5 Customer Reactivation Strategies that Work

Smart business owners and sales reps implement and optimize effective customer reactivation strategies to keep existing customers engaged.

That’s because selling to existing customers is much easier than attracting new ones. Businesses have a 60-70% chance of selling to existing customers and only a 5-20% chance of selling to a new one. Existing customers are not only more likely to buy, but they also spend, on average, 31% more than new ones.

When customers stop responding to marketing efforts, many businesses abandon them. But why abandon a customer who has already done business with you? Even if a customer hasn’t responded for a while, marketing dollars are still better spent courting dormant customers than acquiring new ones.

In fact, it’s 3–10 times more expensive to acquire new business than it is to reactivate unresponsive customers. In this blog post, we’ll explore the reasons behind customer inactivity and share effective tools and customer reactivation strategies that small business sales teams can use to successfully win back those dormant customers.

Understanding inactive customers

Before selecting the most effective customer reactivation strategies for your business, it’s crucial to understand why certain customers have become dormant. Knowing the reasons behind their inactivity enables you to create targeted reactivation strategies that address their specific concerns or needs. This will lead to a more effective strategy and reduce future disengagement.

To identify why customers went dormant, start by analyzing customer data. Review dormant customers’ purchase history, engagement metrics, and interaction patterns to detect any changes or trends that may explain their inactivity. Additionally, conduct surveys and feedback requests to gather direct insights into their reasons for disengagement.

External factors, such as shifts in market conditions or competitive offerings, might also play a role. After pinpointing the reasons for inactivity, categorize customers based on these insights and determine the most effective reactivation strategies and messaging for each group.

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How to re-engage inactive customers

Re-engaging inactive customers can be a game-changer for your business, transforming lost opportunities into renewed relationships. After uncovering the reasons behind their disengagement, you can start crafting various customer reactivation strategies.

How to re-engage inactive customers

• • Email retargeting
  • Personalized messaging 
  • Text messaging
  • Deep-linking
  • Good old-fashioned email
  • Frequently asked questions about customer reactivation

1) Email retargeting

In email retargeting, your company uses a retargeting cookie to trigger ads on the web pages your customers visit after they click on the emails you send them. But what if your customers aren’t clicking on your emails? What if they’re ignoring them completely?

In this case, you can create a specific email list with all your inactive users and start a customer reactivation campaign just for them. By uploading this list to the retargeting program, the people on that list will start seeing your ads across their web and social media pages even without having to click on your email.

This strategy has delivered some impressively high ROIs for companies like BustedTees, which employed an email retargeting strategy that displayed ads across the web to customers who made a recent purchase. Their ads generated an ROI of 390%, renewing brand interest and increasing conversions.

2) Personalized messaging

Sometimes, the lack of customer activity is your fault. If you haven’t automated your marketing outreach and are sending sporadic messages or no messages at all, then the customer has nothing to respond to. When a customer makes a purchase, make sure you follow up with targeted messages that reflect their preferences and add value to their experience with your company.

The entire point of collecting data is to find out what makes a customer buy and cultivate a marketing campaign that targets their interests. With existing customers, you have the benefit of knowing their purchase history and habits. For example, you could remind them how much they liked a particular product by sending them a message with a discount for that product.

Suggest new products that they might like based on their past behaviors. Use geo-targeting to message them when they’re within the store’s range. And always use their name when sending them a message. The more relevant your marketing approach is, the greater your chances are for customer reactivation.

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3) Text messaging

SMS is an excellent lead-capture tool for many reasons. Texting is a popular form of communication, with Americans sending and receiving an average of 32 texts per day. Text messaging is also convenient since messages are sent and received on a mobile device that customers can look at and respond to in any setting and at their leisure.

Texts also have incredibly high open rates—at least 78% higher than email. And, unlike email, text messages don’t run the risk of being stored in spam folders. [Tweet this] In this case study for Henry Insurance Agency, owner Ken Henry noticed a difference between the results of their email marketing campaign versus their text marketing campaign:

“I was amazed that people ignored my calls and emails but replied to a text. This is especially true for younger consumers. Now we text first, then follow up with a call or email.”

SMS can be used as a customer reactivation strategy to re-energize stalled customer relations when email and app messages aren’t yielding results.

4) Deep-linking

When trying to re-engage dormant customers, you want to make it as easy as possible them to take a desired action. When doing in-app marketing, don’t forget to include deep-linking, which provides a shortcut link to the exact product page the customer has expressed interest in without them having to go to the homepage first and then search for the product.

For the recipe app Yummly, deep-linking helped increase its user retention rate by 35 percent. With customers who haven’t been responsive to your marketing, it’s even more important to remove all the obstacles from their path to purchasing a product. Even if a customer hasn’t responded for a while, sending them an app notification or SMS message with an exact link to a product they were previously interested in could push them towards conversion.

5) Good old-fashioned mail

When your digital marketing isn’t working, putting something physical into non-responsive customers’ hands can pay off. Create a segmented list of unresponsive customers and send them something unique in the mail. Dimensional mail, as opposed to flat mail, gets 20 times more penetration and as much as 75% higher demand generation.

Mail also has incredible response rates, raking in 600% higher response rates than all digital marketing channels combined. [Tweet this] Receiving a marketing gift in the mail is the stuff of VIP treatment and can ignite a lapsed customer’s interest by making them feel valued.

Re-engaging dormant clients is absolutely worth the investment, and with a few strategies and tools, you can woo some of them back to life. Retargeting campaigns, personalized messaging, SMS marketing, deep linking, and direct mail can all make unresponsive customers active again.

Implement a sound re-engagement process pipeline

To re-engage inactive customers effectively, your team needs a clear, repeatable process. Creating a dedicated pipeline for reactivation helps you stay organized, track progress, and assign the right owners to each lead.

With Nutshell’s follow-up pipeline automation, you can automatically route closed or inactive leads into a re-engagement pipeline—ensuring every lead gets the attention it deserves. This keeps your marketing and sales efforts aligned and prevents valuable opportunities from slipping through the cracks.

Boost Customer Reactivation Using Nutshell CRM

Using a CRM like Nutshell is essential for re-engaging dormant customers. Our platform provides comprehensive tools for tracking and analyzing customer data, allowing you to segment inactive clients and develop targeted reactivation strategies.

With Nutshell, you can automate personalized outreach, efficiently manage follow-ups, and monitor engagement metrics, making reconnecting and revitalizing valuable customer relationships easier.

Not a Nutshell user yet? Take advantage of our 14-day free trial, which lets you test all our great features and determine how Nutshell can help you delight and retain your customers.