Customer Relationships & Win-Back Campaigns to Improve Customer Retention
The relationship between the customer and the brand is one of the most important factors in cultivating long-term customer loyalty. Companies rely on Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platforms and tools to help manage their customers, but many businesses have actually forgotten the most important factor: the customer relationship.
Let’s discuss how your brand can improve your customers’ emotional loyalty toward your brand and make the best of its relationship with its customers. These methods and tools to build on, mend, and/or measure customer relationships include CRM tools, win-back e-mail campaigns, personalization, and more.
Contents
- Customer Relationship Management (CRM): Don’t Forget the ‘R’
- Customer Relationships and Win-Back Campaigns
- How to Create Successful Win-Back Campaigns
- Don't Remind Customers You're Watching
- Nurture Customer Relationships with Value
- How to Give Value to Your Customers
- Make Your Customers Feel Special
- Expert Advice to Build Your Customer Relationships
Customer Relationship Management (CRM): Don’t Forget the ‘R’
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is essential for thriving businesses to create and maintain loyal customers. However, businesses often forget the most important word in the CRM acronym: Customer Relationship Management. But is your business taking full advantage of CRM to effectively manage your customer relationships?
CRM technology helps support customers, increase retention, and, most importantly, cultivate genuine relationships between the customer and the brand. We need CRM to create, build, and mend relationships with customers, ultimately leading to an increase in overall revenue.
Win-Back Campaigns through Customer Relationships
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tools can be utilized to win back former customers and almost customers. Brands can create a successful win-back campaign by focusing on the customer relationship. But what is a win-back campaign?
What Is a Win-Back Campaign?
A win-back campaign is one of the best ways to improve customer retention. Imagine you recently went on a date. Afterward, you a text saying you had a good time, but you don’t push the communication beyond that. After receiving no reply, you begin to feel like you don’t want to miss out, but you also don’t want to seem overeager. With that in mind, you decide the best time and method to reach out.
Translate that to the business world, and you have an example of a win-back campaign. And the fact that the timing of the second communication was based on the unique person and experiences shows you put important thought into the timing of the win-back campaign timing.
How to Create Successful Win-Back Campaigns
What is the best way to successfully convert on your win-back campaign and build the customer relationship further?
Consider which of the email campaign subject-line examples below is likely to be the most successful for a win-back campaign.
- “OMG, I missed you so much”
- “I noticed you haven’t talked to me in a while”
- “Hey, I had fun last time, what does your weekend look like?”
The third choice seems like a no-brainer, but many brands continue to use styles and messaging similar to the first two in their communication and marketing strategies. That’s not the most effective way to win back your customers.
Don't Remind Customers You're Watching
Yes, it sounds creepy. But almost all customers know you’re tracking their behavior and measuring time since their last visit. They just don’t want to be reminded of it. If the subject line of a campaign email reads something like “It’s been 165 days since you visited...,” you may need to adjust your customer engagement strategy.
Messaging like that may cause would-be customers to feel creeped out or that the company seems desperate — neither of which would be good for the customer relationship and our win-back email campaigns.
It’s not enough to rely on a marketing automation system to simply say, “Please tell John Smith we haven’t seen them in 90 days, and we miss them.” Don’t treat your customers like a simple transaction. The customer needs to feel like you see them.
Focus your win-back campaigns on the customer relationship. Center your interactions around a more personalized campaign that cultivates the customer relationship. This will be much more effective at winning back customers and building loyalty towards your brand.
Nurture Customer Relationships with Value
“You may be doing a mass weekly email, which is okay, but brands should avoid more emails that are in no way personalized. The path forward is to start small and prove the personalization value proposition.” — Don Smith, EVP/Chief Analytics Officer, Brierley
Consistently nurturing the relationships between your customers and your brand is key. Find opportunities to show your customers that you care about them and that you don’t take them for granted.
How can you show your customers how important they are to your business or brand? What can you give them of value?
How to Give Value to Your Customers
Sometimes it’s enough to remind your customers that your brand exists, but usually you want to offer your customers something of value in order to nurture the relationship. You always want your business or brand to be a recent (and positive!) thought in your customers’ minds.
Education, alternate engagement, and general conversation are all other good ways to reopen that conversation with the customer. Consider the following examples of reaching out to customers:
- “You love pancakes, right? Did you know that we have the top-rated pancakes in the state according to Pancakes Magazine?”
- “Remember that phone case you purchased last month? How’s that going? We’d love for you to rate it to help others.”
- “Check it out! Here’s a preview just for you of our newest Sports Ball T-Shirt coming this spring.”
By focusing on the customer relationship, you have reopened your communication channel in a non-intrusive manner. You aimed to grow the relationship and invited your customers to reengage and reconnect. And you did it to connect and grow the relationship between your customers and your brand, not out of desperation.
Make Your Customers Feel Special
If your win-back campaign doesn’t work immediately, that’s okay. Life is busy, we forget things, and we get distracted. Sometimes it takes a few attempts at communication to get a relationship back on track.
Keep looking for ways to make your customer interactions special to further expand on the relationship. For example, you can try introducing personalized special offers, member benefits, gamification elements, or just start with communicating with your customers in a more genuine way. Look at the following messaging for examples:
- “Hey Dan, we’ve got something special just for you on your next visit.”
- “We want you to be the first to try our new BBQ flavor, Kyle!”
- “Members only extended shopping hours for you this Sunday”
In a relationship, whether personal or with your customers, your actions are key. If you really want to grow, enrich, and retain a relationship with your customers, show them appreciation. Treat each of your customers like a person.
Get Expert Advice to Build Your Customer Relationships
For expert consultation on building customer relationships with your brand and increasing emotional loyalty, the experienced customer loyalty experts at Brierley are ready to help.
Brierley’s Strategy and Consumer Insights (CI) Teams can help with projects such as CX Journey Mapping, Competitor Evaluations, Communication Audits, Loyalty Ideation Workshops, and more. We also offer a range of FAST Track modules which deliver strategy and consumer insights that can help you in evaluating and enhancing your member experience to ensure you maximize every opportunity to drive customer engagement.
Contact us today to learn more about how Brierley’s customer loyalty strategists can help your brand create or optimize a relationship-focused customer loyalty solution.