There are lots of things in business which can seem so obvious, but almost everyone forgets to do. Things which can result in quick, easy wins that result in more sales.
This is one of those. One of the easiest wins you can ever have is contacting your old loyal customers.
If I asked you, could you give me a list of customers who bought from you over 6 months ago and never came back?
Let’s say you could. From there, do you know what you could do to get them back spending more money?
The longer you leave these customers to rot, the less chance they’ll ever buy from you again.
A really good time to fix that…. Is right now.
The good news is that it is pretty easy to do. At the end of this post, you’ll see how a client of ours got their old customers back and made an extra $4,508 almost overnight.
How did we get here?
Our client runs an online food store.
Just to keep it going, there is so much to do… From organising suppliers to fulfilment to marketing. Everything has to be crammed into the little time they have.
It’s so easy to get caught up in the process. Day to day, week to week, month to month. Suddenly months have gone by and you have no idea where they went.
You can easily end up forgetting about managing your customer relationships. There’s a pretty good chance you had someone buy from you 8 months ago and then vanish.
And not because they didn’t like what you sell. It’s probably just because they forgot about you. It happens ALL the time.
That’s exactly what happened with our client.
We took a quick look at their order history. While they had loads of regular customers, they also had a lot of customers that used to buy over and over again. But all of a sudden, each one of them had just vanished.
Obviously, the product was great. These customers had bought many times. But then maybe they went on holidays for a few weeks came home and totally forgot.
On a side note…. These days it is an easy task to set up automatic reminders so this never happens to you. However if they have already left, we’ll have to fix that first…
Getting them back
The first task was to get a list of past orders with customer info. With this, we created a list of all customers who:
- Had spent over a certain total amount
- Had ordered 2 or more times
- Hadn’t ordered in 6 months
Next we imported that list into our email system (ActiveCampaign – it is awesome).
Next we generated a coupon code which was valid for only one use per customer. It was sent to everyone we just imported.
The email was super simple. The basic format went:
“Hey, we haven’t heard from you in a while. We miss you! A lot has changed, and we’d love for you to come back and check it out. Here’s a discount code you can use to get 10% off!”
You might also want to say something like
“If you left on purpose… did we do something wrong? Please reply to this and let us know what happened! We read every response.”
We sent it out and waited.
The results were better than we even imagined.
This client’s next month revenue was 28% higher than previous months.
Better yet, some of those returning clients signed up for subscriptions which added recurring revenue.
One email is all it took.
What now?
This isn’t a special case.
It’s incredibly likely that what worked for this client would also work for you. With a couple of hours spare (less if you are an Excel guru), you can do exactly what we did and get a whole lot of business back out of nowhere.
You’d be crazy not to.
Put it in your to do list right now – export your orders, import old customers and send them an email. That’s it.
Have you ever reactivated old customers? Tell me your story in the comments below…
