Must-have Customer Win-back Strategies for Ecommerce Businesses

_{Your quick guide to getting started with customer win-back strategies for D2C and e-commerce businesses}

Customer churn is a significant challenge for eCommerce businesses. According to a recent study by Shopify, more than half of all online stores lose customers within six months and even more lose them within one year.

Customer retention is one of the most important parts of a business.

Keeping existing customers happy and loyal to your brand is a great way to ensure that they will continue buying from you in the future.

However, it’s not always easy to retain customers. If they have any issues with their experience, they may choose to go elsewhere.

In order to keep these customers happy and loyal, it’s important to think about how you can win them back if they do leave for another brand or retailer. One way to go about this is through well-defined customer win-back strategies.

But what exactly should this strategy look like?

As per Shopify, one of the biggest loss segments is more than 60 days of non-activity. In this article, we want to list down all the strategies one can implement to win back a customer.

What is a Customer Win-back Strategy, and Why is it Important?

Winback strategies are meant to help you recover lost customers. These customers have stopped buying from your business for any reason, whether it’s because they’ve found a better alternative or because they’re simply not happy with what you’re offering them anymore.

With eCommerce businesses growing in popularity, winning back lost customers can be challenging. This is especially true if those customers have already bought from other online stores and have been satisfied with their experience there.

Why should you care about win-back strategies?

Winback strategies are a key component of customer retention. In fact, if you have a good win-back strategy in place, you can often re-engage with customers without spending much time or effort on them!

There are several reasons why it is important to create and send a win-back strategy to your customers –

• It boosts your sales.
• Winback campaigns help you recover lost revenue from customers who have not purchased from you in a while and may have forgotten about you.
• They can improve customer loyalty and retention by reminding them of their great experience with your business and encouraging them to return again soon!
• Easily increase the average lifetime value of your existing customers by prompting them to make more purchases.
• Executing a win-back strategy is comparatively less expensive than other campaigns; hence,  they often deliver a higher ROI.
• They help you initiate a conversation with a lost customer, costing you much less than acquiring a new one.

eCommerce win-back strategies you absolutely need

Customer retention and win-back strategies are vital to any business, particularly for eCommerce sellers. When you’re selling online, you easily lose your connection with your customers.

Your business is not a storefront where they can come in and talk to an employee who can help them find what they’re looking for.

Instead, your customer service team is likely spread out across multiple countries or continents, making it harder to provide an experience as personal as many would like. And since there’s no way to tell if a customer will return after their first purchase, it’s important to make them feel welcome again and again.

Here are a few win-back strategies you need in place –

1. Thank you Message

Thanking your customers is the simplest way to show them that you appreciate their business. A simple “thank you” message can go a long way toward retaining customers and building loyalty.

It can be as simple as “Thank you for your purchase!” or a little more in-depth, like “Thank you for purchasing the [product name]. We hope the [product name] was everything you expected! If there is anything we can do to help make your experience even better, please feel free to reach out to our customer service team at [email address].”

This message aims to keep your customers happy, which will lead them back to making additional purchases in the future.

2. Miss You Messages

Customer win-back strategies can be tricky to get right, but the first step is always the same – make sure you’re on your customers’ radar.

Send them timely notifications as a slight nudge to get them to explore your store again. A simple miss you message, a discount code, or a purchase motivation is a great way to re-initiate their interest.

3. Seek Product Reviews

One of the best ways to win back your customers is by asking them for reviews. This is a great way to stay on top of their minds even after they’ve made a purchase from your store.

You can also consider –

• Offering a discount code or coupon when they leave a review. This will encourage them to share their experience with others and hopefully give you more exposure.
• Creating a section on your product pages where customers can leave reviews.

Allowing customers to give their opinion about products and services helps build loyalty, which can help prevent them from switching to competitors when they’re unhappy with your company.

4. Seek Customer Feedback

Follow up with customers who have purchased from you before. Send them an email asking if they had any problems with their order or if they need help deciding which product to buy next time.

You can also ask them if they would like to receive any special offers from your store in the future, so they’ll remember where they bought their last item from.

5. Run Customer Surveys

Data is gold. It can help you figure out where you are lacking and what needs to be further perfected.

Remember, you’re here to deliver the best customer experience, so the best bet is to ask the customer what their experience of shopping from you was like.

In order to understand what drives your customers’ behaviour, you need to ask them directly! Ask questions about what they like/dislike about your brand, why they chose you over another brand, how often they buy from you etc. – this will give you valuable insight into what makes them tick (and doesn’t).

Conduct targeted marketing campaigns to get feedback from customers who have not shopped with you in a while or may have even cancelled their subscription or membership with you previously due to a bad experience with your brand/service/product etc., which can help you rectify any issues that may have led them to take such action so that they come back again into your sales funnel and become regular customers once again!

A well-designed survey can also help increase conversions by upselling products that customers may not have realised existed on your site previously but now want after completing the survey they were exposed to.

6. Send Personalised Product Recommendations

The right product recommendations can help you win back lost customers.

In the last section, we talked about how you can use data to better understand your customers and find ways to get them to spend more money with you. But once you’ve done that research, what do you do next?

The answer is simple – you need to ensure your customers get the products they want. If they aren’t getting what they want from you, it’s only a matter of time before leaving for another brand.

That’s why personalised product recommendations are so important for eCommerce businesses. They help customers find exactly what they need without having to search through thousands of options on their own.

Product recommendations are one of the best ways to get your customers back into the buying mindset — especially if they’re already familiar with your brand. It helps them see that there is still value in shopping at your store and makes them feel their time isn’t wasted while browsing online stores looking for something new to buy.

7. Share Content

This is the most passive way to win back your customers. You can share content that will help them in their journey, whether through a blog post or an email newsletter. The best part about this strategy is that it doesn’t require direct interaction with the customer, so it can be used for many different reasons and at any time.

Customers who buy from you are likely to have done so because they liked what they saw and wanted to buy it again – so make sure that this time round, they still see something they like and find value in your brand!

8. Use Special Occasions (like birthdays) to Touch-Base

Regarding customer retention, the most important thing is simply to stay in touch.

The best way to do that is through a personalised, timely message.

There are many ways to do this, but one that can be particularly effective is using special occasions as a reason for contact.

You could send a gift card on birthdays and anniversaries or a note to thank you for your business. If you have an email/SMS list, you could use these to send out a monthly newsletter with information about new products or offers. This is a great way to remind customers that you’re still there for them and that you care about their business.

9. Set up Replenishment Flows

One of the best ways to win back customers is by sending them a reminder email before they run out of stock. You can set this up with a simple automation rule in your email marketing software.

This will prompt them to place an order before they’re out of stock again, and even if they don’t come back to purchase right away, they’ll still have their email address on file so you can send them more targeted offers later on.

This is particularly important if you sell daily-use products like toothpaste or coffee.

The idea behind this strategy is that customers often forget about items in the middle of their shopping carts. Once they’re reminded, they may be more likely to complete their purchases and return to your site again.

Tips to Make your Customer Win-back Strategy Effective

Consider using a Multi-channel Approach

The best way to win back customers is by using multiple channels for communication. This includes the usual mix of email and social media but also popular channels like WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Instagram DM and similar. The more channels you use, the more likely you will reach your target audience.

Today, with powerful conversational tools like LimeChat, you can reach out and re-engage consumers where they are the most active. Streamlining your customer win-back campaigns on one platform also further helps keep a close watch on how your audience engages with the brand, learn from the same and optimise your conversations by leveraging concrete data.

Segment your Customer Base Continually

Segmentation is an important part of any business. You must continually segment based on three important factors: geography, demographics, and behaviour. This will help you find out which customers will likely churn shortly and target them with a personalised approach to win them back.

Furthermore, for customers who’ve remained inactive for a while, you should segment the list further based on how they interact going forward with your win-back campaigns.

Keep it conversational

If you want to win back a customer, you need to keep your communication personal and direct.

Most importantly, you don’t sound like an automated email or a robot. You want to make the customer feel like they’re talking to a real person, so keep it conversational and friendly.

And it is repeatedly proven that human-to-human marketing yields better results.

Leverage AI and Automation

If you haven’t already, it’s time to start using AI-powered tools such as LimeChat to automate routine tasks like customer support and sales.

LimeChat will help you prioritise interactions with high-value customers while freeing up valuable resources for other tasks such as improving customer service quality or developing new products and services.

It helps keep campaigns contextual and timely at scale, using AI to learn from every conversation there is across all the key messaging platforms.

A/B test with Different Win-back Campaigns

Don’t just stick to one type of campaign – experiment and learn how people respond to it.

You can run a discount campaign, offer free shipping, or even a free gift with a purchase promotion. The more options you have, the better your chance at finding something that works.  

The key is testing different kinds of campaigns and seeing what works for your business.

Wrapping up

As an eCommerce business, you may have a customer database that’s worth its weight in gold. But just because you have a list of customers doesn’t mean you’re doing everything you can to keep them.

That’s where customer win-back campaigns come in.

But with the competition increasing by the day, it’s getting harder to re-engage consumer interest. That’s where you need to actively learn from your customers, keep watch on the purchase patterns of new buyers and leverage the patterns to run contextual campaigns.

This is where you will need to leverage technology like AI to process multiple data points across different channels and bring them onto one dashboard. LimeChat is a powerful omnichannel marketing platform that enables ecommerce businesses to run customer win-back campaigns on popular conversational channels like email, SMS, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger and even Instagram DM.

With the help of automated campaigns and the ability to hand off campaigns to live agents, LimeChat can tap into the power of technology and the human touch.

Ready to see how you can run multichannel customer win-back campaigns to boost retention?

Book a demo of LimeChat today.