It costs 5x more to attract a new customer than it does to retain an existing one.01
Acquisition vs. retention is a constant battle. Obviously, it’s important to pursue new customers to grow your business. But if you neglect the needs and wants of your active users, they will quickly drop off.
When it comes to growth, retention always has the upper hand. Repeat customers are the lifeblood of your app. They’re more profitable, more responsive to campaigns, and more likely to bring in new users through word of mouth.
That’s where win-back campaigns come in.
According to Marketing Land, win-back campaigns have 12% open rates, and 75% of re-engaged subscribers read a follow-up message within 89 days. The other 25% were still opening messages up to 300 days after receiving the first win-back message.02
Win-backs are a winner for engaging your inactive users.
In this post, we’ll share the essentials of a successful win-back campaign, including a real-life example of how we re-engaged inactive customers.
What is a Win-Back Campaign?
Win-back campaigns are generally sent to users who have become dormant within an app. The goal of a win-back campaign is to rekindle their interest in your brand and products.
To different brands, this could translate into completely different goals:
For a travel brand, getting a user to book another trip
For a streaming platform, getting a user to start watching a series again
For a B2B company, engaging those who did not make a purchase
Most marketers run win-back campaigns through email since it’s less intrusive, more familiar and offers more space to create an attractive proposition than SMS or push notifications.
Why Do I Need a Win-Back Strategy?
Every day, new leads are added to your CRM tool. While only a few move down the conversion funnel, many of these contacts haven’t purchased or engaged with your brand after that first touch.
These leads may seem like dead ends, but they hold a lot of potential! They’ve likely already provided you with a lot of information about them — their names, contact details, certain preferences — even if they’ve only interacted with your app once.
Bottom line: You can generate a lot more revenue by nurturing these mid-level leads.
Win-back Colombia Phone Numbers List campaigns also help you conduct a health check on your CRM.
Lead data grows stale over time. Win-back campaigns help evaluate the health of your CRM by checking how many people respond to campaigns and nudge you to set a threshold of attempts before you let go of a particular contact.
For example, if you’ve tried to re-engage a user three times with no success, you may decide to push that user into a group of cold leads. That way, you’re not bombarding them with information they already have and can focus your resources on leads that are more likely to respond.
The purpose behind win-back campaigns is not to win 100% of your users back (as wonderful as that sounds). It’s to bring back those users who, at some point, saw value in your brand and have the potential to become champions.
Who Should My Win-Back Campaign Target?
Identifying which users to target with your win-back campaign is crucial to your success.
What qualifies a user as inactive will vary slightly depending on your app and your business. For a streaming platform, it could be someone who used to actively watch content but has not logged in, in the last two months. For an ecommerce app, it could be someone who used to make a purchase every 10 days but hasn’t made a purchase in the last month.
At CleverTap, we define an inactive user as someone who signed up for a demo in the last 6 months but has not engaged further.
Types of Win-Back Campaigns
What are you trying to achieve through your win-back campaign? Is it re-engagement or a purchase?
Here are the different types of win-back campaigns you can run:
Incentivize them to use your service
A lot of businesses incentivize their users in order to get them on a demo call. It could be as simple as giving them a Starbucks card or providing them with an additional month of usage. The offering needs to be something that delivers value to them. And if you can personalize it for them, even better.
Gather feedback on your product
You can create a win-back campaign to better understand the user’s experience with your brand. A lot of people won’t willingly fill out an automated feedback form, but if you are going to email them, let them know how important this feedback is and how much you trust their opinion.
Find out if they want to stay in contact
Your win-back campaign can solely revolve around understanding the intent of the user as well. Ask the user if they’d like to be contacted in future so you know who wants further interactions from you and who doesn’t.
Offer upgrade/downgrade options
You can also use this opportunity to provide flexibility to your user to upgrade or downgrade their services