Lapsed Buyers Are a Goldmine for Retailers. Here’s How You Can Win Them Back

In commerce as in life, the shiny new thing is always most appealing. This is why retailers tend to lavish a disproportionate amount of attention on acquisition. After all, the pool of new customers is potentially unlimited — and who knows how much these fresh new faces might be willing to spend?

However, retailers tend to neglect a fairly crucial portion of their audience: lapsed buyers.

This is unfortunate, because when properly cultivated, these lapsed buyers can function as an essential source of revenue. After all, on average, reactivated buyers spend 12.7% more than new ones.

Reactivation was at the heart of the latest installment of Coffee & Commerce, a deep dive into strategies and tools retailers can use to bring lapsed buyers back to life.

Relearn who your lapsed buyers are

In every quadrant of customer movement — a marketing philosophy and framework that is centered on customers, rather than channels, and moving them through the lifecycle — identification is essential. The first thing retailers must do is figure out exactly who they’re dealing with. You need to validate and identify as many of these lapsed buyers as possible before you can start trying to reactivate them.

Once you’ve done that, it’s time to rank them. You already know these customers’ purchase histories, which helps determine which of them will be most valuable. You also know who stands a higher chance of being reactivated. With that information in mind, you can create a value score for each customer on a high/low axis.

“From there, it’s about figuring out the most economical path forward across the channels at your disposal,” explained Amanda Coffin, Customer Success Leader at Bluecore.

Which channel makes most sense? There is always a cost to customer outreach; you want to make sure that you’re maximizing your spend.

Maximizing spend in this way means getting even more granular. You want to ask yourself, “How can I personalize this experience as much as possible?”

Get a handle on affinities

You now know who your lapsed buyers are. Winning them back is the next step. Luckily, there are many re-engagement tactics that can help you here.

Your own channels will inevitably cost you less, so it’s wisest to start there. Did a customer purchase at a specific time of year, such as Valentine’s Day, Black Friday, or Cyber Monday? If so, they may have a seasonal affinity, one you can handily play into with a well-timed trigger.

But there are other, even more revealing preferences. For instance: category affinity.

Let’s say a lapsed buyer bought the same shirt from you last year in two different colors, and you’ve just released four new colors. This is something they may be genuinely interested in learning. Send that message on the right channel and you very well might make a sale.

There is also, of course, discount affinity. Your customer may be in the bucket of lapsed buyers for whom 10% or 15% off significantly moves the needle. Or maybe it’s free shipping that piques their interest. They could also be drawn to best sellers or a category of product you didn’t offer before. The possibilities are endless.

Through testing — and smart deployment of what you already know — you can learn precisely the kind of lapsed buyer you’re dealing with, and message them accordingly.

Case study: Reactivating Josh

Let’s put it all together. Imagine you have a customer named Josh. He’s a lapsed buyer, who hasn’t engaged in email or visited your site in more than 100 days.

So far, your re-engagement tactics have all failed; he’s simply not opening the emails. But he is, based on your calculations, high value — and worth pursuing. And his purchase history points to a category affinity.

When a customer is high value, has known preferences, and seemingly can’t be reached via email, try paid media. If they don’t seem to use social media — and really do seem high-value — it may even be wise to send them direct mail, although this approach should only be used sparingly.

Reactivating lapsed buyers is a fluid process. Different strategies work for different customers, and finding out which work for which takes work: testing, experimenting, switching between channels. Reactivation is somewhere between an art and a science, which is to say it’s hard to execute but beautiful when it works.

The fact is that many of your lapsed buyers are patiently waiting for you to return — they just might not realize it yet.

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