BABY COME BACK! Luring back the lapsed customer

I wrote about segmentation here, and now I want to expound a little more about a specific segment that I think it's important we address.

The lapsed customer.  Who are they?

• Perhaps they are one-time only purchasers (assuming they can purchase more than once).
• They could be customers who fall into groups that may be less-than-ideally served by your business - such as people who always choose the lowest price vs. a good value.
• It's conceivable that these customers had a bad customer service experience with you at some point.
• Maybe they are customers that never got assigned to follow-up with, and they fell through the cracks.
• It could be they've been "captured" by a competitor and have become loyal to them.
• Or maybe they've simply moved away or are no longer in need of your service for reasons completely out of your control.

Note that not all customers in this segment are completely gone.  Some just have one foot out the door and are still transacting, but just not as much as they used to.

Lapsed customers fall into two basic groups:  customers you have a chance to win back, and customers you don't.  Put the customers who have disappeared off the face of the earth and those who are less than ideal belong in the latter group, so don't bother to try.  The rest fall into the first group - those you have a chance to win back.

Next, set out to win them back and hopefully, keep them.  Here's a few top-line ideas for things to try:

• Contact them and ask them how you can serve them better.  This can draw out some of the reasons that they have dropped off that are within your control that you may be able to address.
• Offer a "come back" special that's really attractive
• Look for ways to connect with them on a more personal level - invite them to business mixer functions, leads groups, and community events.  This is especially cool if you can acquire "VIP" treatment for them at the event.

The mission is to find a way to reconnect, and reestablish these customers as established customers.  They liked you at one point - find ways for them to like you now. Their business will follow.

Got any great ideas or stories of how you brought 'em back? I'd love to hear them!

Everybody Is Not The Same: Basic Ways to Segment Your Database

Hello, Ms. Small Biz Gal.  You've built yourself a pretty nice database there.

You have a good clean list, you are recording basic info like important milestone dates (first date of contact, first transaction, last transaction, birth dates, anniversaries, etc.).  You can tell the difference between prospects and actual customers, and you can, in some ways, record sales to your customers.  (You're awesome, by the way - and miles ahead of lots of your peers.)

Let's say, for the sake of this post, that you're contacting all these folks via email, although this is valid for any of your channels in which you talk directly to customers.

Hypothetically, you're going to tell them about a great new deal you have going - you're going to give a discount to new customers. This is what you want to send:

Hello, new customers!  We're so excited about the opportunity to add you to our family, we'd love to offer you 10% off your next purchase with Ms. Small Biz, Inc! Offer expires in a week, so hurry in - we can't wait to see you!

Is this the right thing to send... to the entire database?  If you think about it, you know the answer - which is NO, of course not.  This is only good for your prospect list!

So why are you sending this out to customers that aren't prospects?  How do you avoid making this mistake?

The simplest answer is to use a very basic database segmentation.  And here it is:

Of course, for your business, what a "new" customer might mean may be slightly different, and the same with "lapsed".  And of course, you can sub-segment each group any number of ways, if you have the time, tools, and strategy to manage that complexity well.

In our hypothetical case, the email above can be sent to the prospects only, and not the rest of the group.   Simple.

Lots of people violate this every day, by not taking the time to create the basic segmentation above - I'm always surprised as I get this from people I think should know better (aka, other marketers).

Truly, without this basic segmentation, it can make your direct marketing far less effective.

So, Ms. Small Biz, take a moment and assign the segmentation to your database as noted above, and keep it up as you onboard new customers and as their status changes (yes, there are tools for this).

Need help?  I can do that, y'know.  Let me know!  Drop me an email!