Customer Reactivation Campaigns: Definition, Purposes, and Strategies

As a retail marketer, you’re always looking for actionable advice that will make your marketing program more efficient and effective.

But for many marketers, retaining and re-engaging customers will require a different approach to retail marketing. So we’ve created this written guide to give you a primer on why reactivation strategies are important and how you can start improving yours today.

If you prefer watching more than reading, check out the video that inspired this post:

What is Customer Reactivation?

Customer reactivation means “winning back” customers who have become disengaged with highly relevant, targeted outreach. Usually, reactivation strategies are put into motion when a customer stops purchasing products for a predefined period of time. 

When marketers notice these customers pull away, they will try to bring them back into the fold with a reactivation campaign.

Why Customer Reactivation Campaigns Are Important

When we look at our customers, we find about a third of annual revenue comes from repeat buyers. That’s because these repeat shoppers will spend close to 3x more than new shoppers.

It’s also a lot easier to drive an additional purchase from an existing buyer than to acquire an entirely new customer – retailers know their current customers better than an unknown customer. 

Even the most basic retail marketing strategies are able to track what customers purchased in the past, the number of times they bought from your brand, when they shop and how often they shop. For marketers with slightly more advanced strategies, it’s also possible to track when people are on your website, how often they browse and the types of products and content with which they engage.

To summarize, the importance of reactivation campaigns is two-pronged.

• First, existing customers provide more value to retailers at a lower cost. 
• Second, retailers already know what drives customers to purchase – they just have to figure out how to push the right buttons.

The Challenges of Building Customer Reactivation Campaigns

With all that you know about your existing customers, you’d think it would be easy to retain them through personalized email communications and keep them in an active buying cycle. Unfortunately, it’s not that easy.

That’s primarily because retail marketers have limited access to rich customer data. As a result, we typically see marketers look at average behaviors, and then use these averages to determine when and how to engage shoppers. In reality, we know no two people are exactly the same – but many marketing strategies assume just that.

Let’s say you have two loyal shoppers: Mark, who purchases every 30 days, and Jamie, who purchases every 90 days. If you were to use the average buying time frame of 60 days, you can see that a reactivation message would deploy way too late for Mark, who’s probably gone on to another competitor of yours and made his purchase elsewhere. For Jamie, this message is way too early. We expect Jamie to make a purchase every 90 days, so she is acting exactly as we’d expect her to. That means sending Jamie a “we miss you” message along with a promotional offer to bring them back is only going to give away a margin and potentially send the wrong signal to Jamie.

How to Win Back Customers with a Reactivation Strategy

Instead of taking the average of all your customers’ buying cadences, you should set an individual cadence for each of your customers. Mark would be flagged as a 30-day shopper and Jamie would be flagged as a 90-day shopper, allowing you to react to any deviations from each customer’s normal behaviors in real time. You can do this in Bluecore easily by setting up an at-risk trigger that can deploy outreach every one, seven or 30 days and send to customers who have deviated from their individual buying cadence within that time frame.

Let’s talk about what should be in your outreach, starting with Mark. By examining his past behavior, we know his last purchase was a pair of shoes and he typically buys every 30 days. However, it’s now been 45 days since his last purchase. This is a clear sign to reach out and encourage him to get back on your site and make another purchase. By using information about his past behavior, you can personalize the content that you send in the following ways:

• You know Mark bought a pair of shoes last, so maybe he’s a runner. You can send him products that other people who have purchased this pair of shoes have also purchased, such as a shirt or running shorts.
• Next, you can personalize a promotion for Mark. Maybe that’s a certain percentage off or free shipping — something to get him to see the value in coming back to your store.
• Finally, you can round out the email with additional personalized content, such as running tips or additional products like best sellers or new arrivals in Mark’s favorite product categories.

With all of that complete, you have relevant content going to Mark at just the right time, and hopefully he opens that email, clicks through and makes another purchase from your store.

Turning our attention to Jamie, we know that she typically purchases every 90 days, so you don’t need to send her a reactivation message at 45 days since her last purchase. But you can take the opportunity to personalize a message to Jamie to perhaps increase her lifetime value and decrease the time between purchases. Here’s how this personalized outreach might look:

• Knowing that Jamie bought a shirt last, you can send her products that would complete the look, so maybe a pair of pants or a sweater to wear over that shirt.
• Then, you can send additional style guides or content to get Jamie to click through and make yet another purchase to remain in an active buying state.

By structuring your reactivation campaigns in a way that targets an individual customer’s motivations, they’ll be far more likely to not only notice your outreach, but take action because of it.

Are You Ready to Rethink Your Customer Reactivation Strategy?

There you have it: A look at why customer reactivation and retention is so important, why it’s challenging for marketers to do and ways to do it better by thinking about individual buying cadences and product preferences. Hopefully you can use these tips to increase the effectiveness of your reactivation campaigns and make your workflows a lot more efficient.