CHAPTER 10

Bringing Back Lost Customers

Bringing Wilted Leaves Back to Life

You wouldn’t expect a business lesson to be learned from colonoscopies, but in the book titled Authentic Happiness: Using the New Positive Psychology to Realize Your Potential for Lasting Fulfillment, Dr. Martin Seligman writes about a medical experiment that elucidates a powerful business lesson.

[In one experiment], 682 patients were randomly assigned to either the usual colonoscopy or to a procedure in which one extra minute was added on at the end, but with the colonoscope not moving. A stationary colonoscope provides a less uncomfortable final minute than what went before, but it does add one extra minute of discomfort. The added minute means, of course, that this group gets more total pain than the routine group. Because their experience ends relatively well, however, their memory of the episode is much rosier and, astonishingly, they are more willing to undergo the procedure again than the routine group. In your own life, you should take particular care with endings, for their color will forever tinge your memory of the entire relationship and your willingness to reenter it.¹

Seligman is a psychology professor at the University of Pennsylvania, so he may not have caught the ramifications of this study to the world of business. However, it offers us one of the most powerful lessons of all. What we can learn from this study is that the way the customer relationship ends is almost as important as how it starts in the first place, because it directly increases the chances that the customer will reenter the relationship. Rarely, though, do we focus on ending our customer relationships—and, more important, on how to bring those customers back if they do leave.

This chapter is primarily about three important yet often overlooked aspects of business. First, how to identify when the customer relationship is over; second, how to ensure that the ending is as positive as possible; and, finally, how to bring lost customers back. This process starts with asking a simple question: How do you know when you’ve lost a customer?

Welcome to one of my favorite topics: the art of customer reactivation. Why customers leave and how to bring them back is one of the most misunderstood problems for organizations everywhere. It’s also one of the most profitable areas for companies to focus on—particularly since bringing back a lost customer is less costly than getting a new one.

In this chapter, I’ll look at methods that you can use to determine when a customer should be put in the “lost” pile. I’ll explain the four main reasons customers leave or stop doing business with you, and I’ll provide a few ways for you to bring lost customers back, or at the very least to leave them with a positive impression so that they don’t feel the need to spread any negative word-of-mouth about your company. Most marketing books don’t touch these types of discussions because they aren’t “sexy” enough. But I’ve helped numerous small-business clients generate upward of $70,000 from a single reactivation campaign, and substantially more for larger companies. Skimping on these important topics, frankly, simply doesn’t make good business sense.

IDENTIFYING WHEN THE CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP IS OVER

Unless your business runs on a continuity-billing model (in other words, you receive recurring payments from your customers, as do cell phone providers, utilities, and subscription services), it can be almost impossible for many businesses to determine just when a customer is “lost.” Consider the example of a clothing retailer. If somebody buys a pair of pants from you on January 1, is that person still counted as a customer if she hasn’t made another purchase by March 15? June 24? December 10? What if it has been years since the last purchase?

Now let’s consider a few examples outside of retail: How about a customer who ate dinner at your restaurant three months ago? Is he still a customer? What about the customer who hasn’t logged into your iPhone app for seven months? Is she still a customer? How about the customer who missed his scheduled appointment and now isn’t answering your calls?

When should you consider putting a customer in the lost pile? For a business interested in building long-term relationships with its customers, this is one of the most challenging questions to answer. It can be very hard to determine the precise moment when somebody stops being a customer. However, the hard, cold fact is that not every person who has done business with your organization at some point should still be considered a customer. Yet most companies spend the same amount of money marketing to someone who did a transaction with them six years ago as they do someone who did a transaction six months, six weeks, or even six minutes ago. This is a big mistake.

Someone is only a customer based on his or her last interaction with your business. That’s it. That’s why it is up to you to maintain, foster, and build the relationship. At any time after the moment of purchase or transaction, you need to be aware that your “today customers” may be going elsewhere. This is why reactivation and bringing lost customers back is one of the most important strategic profit centers for any organization.

Defining a “Lost” Customer for Your Business

A customer should be considered “lost” when that person has purchased from your business in the past but has not returned when you expected. So … when, exactly, do you expect your customer back? That’s the proverbial $64,000 question, and the one that each organization must answer for itself. This isn’t a one-size-fits-all situation. Each industry operates on a different time frame. For example, a restaurant owner who hasn’t seen a customer in the past thirty days should consider that customer lost and take massive action to bring the customer back. The dentist should consider a customer lost if he hasn’t returned for the six-month checkup. The accountant might consider a customer lost if she isn’t in touch at the regular tax-filing cycle—either quarterly or annually. You need to decide when the customer is considered lost in your organization or industry.

Segmenting Your Customer Base

There are six main types of customers, as detailed below. To help you determine which customers are “lost,” it might help to survey the complete landscape and to articulate the criteria that justify a customer being in each category. Another benefit of segmenting your customer base in this manner is that it can help you tailor your communication efforts, since each of these customer groups requires very different, unique, and specialized marketing.

•   Prospects. These are people who are considering buying from you. You may be going after them or they may come to you. Regardless, they’re not customers yet.

•   New Customers. They’ve made the decision to purchase your content. Congrats, they’re now considered customers!

•   Defecting Customers. The moment after a purchase has been made, you are essentially already dealing with a defecting customer. Now, I know you might be saying to yourself, “Not so fast, Noah! You mean to tell me even though this person just became a customer, I’m already at risk of losing him?” That’s correct. Any customer who has recently done business with you should be considered defecting at this point. See why retention systems are so important?

•   “Alarm” Customers. These are customers or groups of customers who have set off a Mission: Impossible–style trip wire and are showing signs that they are getting ready to leave your business. (Don’t worry, in a minute I’ll show you how to recognize when a customer has tripped this alarm.) If you are able to determine that they are defecting or that their behavior is changing in some way, then you can take the appropriate steps to retain them.

•   Evergreen Customers. These customers continue to do business with you based on a repurchasing frequency that makes sense for your business. They also show a willingness to take part in your community structures and have an ongoing relationship with you.

•   Lost Customers. This one is simple. For whatever reason, you’ve lost those customers. Now you need to attempt to bring them back.

We’ve all seen the great lip service given to customer retention and satisfaction over the years, but very little is done once a customer is lost. In fact, organizations very quickly slip back into the old sex-addiction mindset by once again asking, “Can you tell me how to get more new customers? Because that’s what I really need—and I need them now!” My goal now is to convince you that all the time, effort, and money that is required to attract and bring in new customers is disproportionately high compared with the tiny bit of effort required to bring back lost customers.

I’ll say it again: A tiny bit of effort—that’s all it takes.

In the next section I’m going to look at customer attrition, and why it happens in the first place. Then I’ll provide some step-by-step actions you can take both to minimize customer attrition as well as to bring back those lost customers.

FIGURING OUT WHY CUSTOMERS LEAVE IN THE FIRST PLACE

Customer attrition is the flip side of customer retention, so before we start talking about how to bring customers back, it only makes sense to look at the reasons they leave in the first place. Let’s face it. You don’t have to be a genius to realize that, no matter what you do, customers are going to leave. Attrition is a natural part of any business, and your business is no different. As you learned in Chapter 8, some attrition is good—and to be encouraged. Not every customer is worth keeping. But most customers are worth keeping, and some businesses lose a tremendous number of them every year without having a real understanding of how and why, and what they can do about it.

I break all customer attrition down into four general categories:

1.   Your company screwed up.

2.   The customer experienced unavoidable external circumstances.

3.   The customer genuinely no longer needs what you’re offering.

4.   The customer falls out of the habit of doing business with your company.

I’ll explain each of the four general categories in turn, and then I’ll tell you what you can do to minimize the impact of attrition and provide tactics to bring lost customers back.

A Screwup

Maybe you (or a staff member) did or said something to offend the customer. Maybe the customer saw something in your organization that just didn’t sit right. Maybe you were terse one day; maybe a staff member was rude; maybe somebody didn’t reply to an e-mail in a timely fashion, or the message was interpreted as having a condescending or negative tone. Maybe the wrong products were delivered, or the order was short. Perhaps the blunder cost another company millions of dollars. Whatever it was, the responsibility is yours.

These situations would all be considered screwups and the worst way to lose a customer. The good news is that this type of attrition is fairly rare. And if it’s not—if you are routinely rude to customers, hire mean or discourteous staff, flub orders on a regular basis, and take weeks to get back to customers when they contact you—well, then maybe it’s time to close up shop.

Less extreme than a full-fledged screwup, sometimes customers leave because they don’t mesh with your corporate values, or they just don’t like you (or vice versa). The customer does not match any of your ideal customer archetypes and therefore the conversation between your corporate character and this particular customer is just awkward—like a date gone bad. In these cases, there’s nothing that you can change. Sometimes, you just have to be content with the fact that you’ll never have to deal with this particular customer again. Be glad that the customer left rather than stayed on and caused discord.

External Circumstances

Things happen. Customers get sick. They move. They lose their jobs, or something else occurs. They even die. As uncomfortable and unfortunate as this type of customer attrition is, there are many legitimate reasons why a person may stop doing business with you.

I’m sure it’s not news to you that various parts of the world are in pretty deep economic troubles these days. The economy causes big problems for a lot of people, forcing them to take stock in how much they can afford to spend in every area, including in your business. Unless your company sells caviar or luxury goods, and you successfully sell to the perennially affluent (who, for whatever reason, haven’t been affected by the recent downturn), then chances are some of your former customers simply can’t afford your company’s fees and prices. Often these customers can’t be saved, but that doesn’t mean we should let them go quietly into the night.

Change of Needs

This is the case where a customer came to you for something very specific, and once you took care of that need, the customer didn’t feel a need to continue with your brand or your community. This isn’t always a negative. In fact, there’s still an opportunity for this customer to be impacted by the Evergreen Marketing Equilibrium.

Consider a pregnant woman, or any other number of circumstances where there’s a natural and finite window of need. This soon-to-be mother might only need your content for six months. This customer can still be influenced in such a way that she’ll help you reap the benefits of being Evergreen. She’ll refer you to others and spread positive word-of-mouth about your company. She might even stay involved in the community because of the camaraderie she found. Let’s not forget, too, that finite need can be extended with new content. Amazon, for example, knew when I was shopping for diapers. A couple of years later, Amazon started sending me communications about the hottest toddler toys.

These examples point to one type of need change that is based on a specific and justified time frame. There are, however, variations on this theme. In business, it sometimes happens that a relationship ends abruptly because a customer has simply had her immediate needs met and doesn’t feel any further need to continue the relationship after that. This is often the case with companies that are focused too heavily on content. Without a transitional phase where customers become more interested in the benefits of the community and remaining part of the overall extension of the brand, they have no reason to stay once their immediate concern has been addressed.

Look, the fact that this type of customer attrition exists isn’t inherently bad. It can often be a testament to the wonderful work you’ve done that these customers have made enough gains to be able to keep going without your help. This is the group where you want to be harvesting your success stories and testimonials to share with all of your other customers and prospective customers.

Change of Habit

A customer may have gone away for an extended holiday over the summer and forgotten about the great experience he had with you. Or maybe the customer hit a rough patch, as everybody does at some point, with work, or family, or any number of things, and now can’t find the time or energy to log in to your website or stop by your shop. Perhaps the customer has been trying a competitor’s products and services. Most organizations believe customers are lost because they had a bad experience of some sort. Believe it or not, that’s the least likely cause of attrition.

The most likely cause of attrition—by far—is that the customer simply fell out of the habit of doing business with you and participating with your company. When this happens, people (customers/clients) always tell themselves (and sometimes you) the same thing: “I’ll get back in touch once things settle down a bit.” Of course, we know what happens. Things never settle down. Or when they do, these customers have so much other stuff on their minds that getting involved with your company is the lowest priority on their list—even when getting involved can be of great value to them.

SOLVING YOUR CUSTOMER ATTRITION PROBLEMS

The four categories of customer attrition described will account for almost all the attrition in most businesses. The goal of customer retention, of course, is to be aware of these factors, and put policies and systems into place that are geared toward counteracting the factors that you can control, which, in short, means two of those four categories. Obviously, you can’t control whether people face external circumstances that may keep them from being active customers. Likewise, you can’t decrease the number of customers who leave because they’ve genuinely been helped by you and no longer need your services. (Nor would you want to!) Both of these areas are beyond your control.

Let’s move on to the areas that are within your control: You certainly can influence, to a large extent, the level of screwups or perceived screwups in your office. (Remember the strategies for minimizing your company’s Hierarchy of Horrors that we discussed in Chapter 8.) Likewise, you certainly can put processes into place that aim to ensure your customers don’t fall out of the habit of seeing you when it’s still in their best interests to do so. The trick is to have strategic methods for solving each of these two problems—and it’s my job to show you the ropes. I’m going to start by assuming that you did screw up because, after all, nobody is perfect.…

When You Screwed Up

If you did something to offend or dissatisfy a customer—if you underdelivered on the promises you made or didn’t meet the expectations your marketing set, for instance—and the customer decided to stop doing business with you, then you have a responsibility to try and make it right. More important, these customers need to know how much you care, how you’ve improved or changed, and how important they really are to your business. Remember, every lost customer represents a lot more than just one customer. Think back to Chapter 8, when I showed how to respond to valid and invalid complaints and service requests; as you can see, this process is not much different.

If you find out that the reason for your customer’s leaving was your fault, do whatever you need to do to make amends. Try and show your customer that you care in a specific and meaningful way. This doesn’t always mean giving away something for free or offering some major discount. Customers often see right through that type of strategy. What might be more effective? How about a call from the CEO? Think outside the box. How about a gift certificate to one of your competitors? What can you do—within reason—to make customers realize that you’ve taken their departure from your business seriously?

Customers want to be acknowledged and know they were heard. An apology never hurts. What’s the worst that can happen? If your company screwed up in such a big way that forgiving you isn’t an option, you can still try to end the relationship in the best way possible. Keep in mind the interesting colonoscopy study that I shared at the start of this chapter; if the final moments of an unpleasant experience are less unpleasant than what happened before, it will impact the memory of the entire experience.

The beauty of this mindset is that even the most annoyed of customers, and the biggest of company screwups, can be mitigated with a legitimate, genuine, and authentic follow-up. Try this: First, contact the customer and listen intently. Second, never place blame on someone else in your organization—don’t throw someone under the bus. Third, present a series of options to the customer for rectifying the problem. If the situation is serious enough, then you will want to refer back to the simple diagnostic process for Commonsense Customer Service, as shown in Figure 8-1. In short, you want to assure the customer that you are taking the concerns expressed very seriously.

A screwup is never the end of the world. More often than not, it’s actually an opportunity. When you’re in business, part of your job is to recognize that opportunities are everywhere. How successful you will be is (at least partially) determined by how you choose to see these opportunities.

When Your Customers’ Habits Change

Most customers become ex-customers because they simply forget to keep doing business with us. And most organizations simply move on. It’s back to marketing as usual to find more new customers. This is very scary to think about, and it is a major problem for organizations. If you find that your customers’ habits have changed, resist the temptation to move on. Instead, you should concern yourself with fostering customer interaction. The more your customers are engaged and involved, the more likely they are to stay as customers for the long haul.

You can identify this type of customer attrition very easily by running through the following hypothetical (or very real, for that matter) scenario. Imagine, as a business owner or sales rep, you bump into a customer who has been gone for five months. You start chatting. Then, at some point (as so often happens), the customer says to you, “You know, I’ve been thinking about getting in touch with you again—I’ll do that shortly!”

Sometimes they do; sometimes they don’t. For the purposes of this discussion, it really doesn’t matter. What matters is that it’s very likely that until they ran into you, they weren’t thinking about you at all. And understandably so, since most people have more and more on their minds all the time.

The important bit is that people do start thinking about you after they see you, and once they start thinking about you, they recognize the value they received from your business. When this happens, you can be sure that they didn’t leave because you messed up, or because they moved, or because they no longer needed your expertise. They simply fell out of the habit of doing business with you, or it never became a habit in the first place.

Most organizations lose customers for no good reason at all. Things just happen. Actually, the only reason was that their customers’ habits changed—and we can, more often than not, blame poor marketing for that. The best way to mitigate this type of attrition is to stay in the customer’s mind regularly and often. Depending on the type of business you’re in, you want to find some way to establish constant contact. For instance, you might send a monthly newsletter or you might send weekly e-mails with helpful tips. It also certainly helps to develop a strong community. Are you letting your customers simply wander away from the campfire?

ESTABLISHING CONSTANT CONTACT

As we discussed in Chapter 7 when we reviewed loyalty programs, we need to be constantly reinforcing the types of behaviors we want from our customers. If you are losing customers because of inactivity, more often than not you’re not communicating enough with your customers. It’s all about follow-up. Stay in touch with your customers, and stay in touch often. It’s not up to your clients to remember to do business with you. Instead, it’s up to you to remind them.

The first area you need to address is marketing. How often you’re communicating with customers is key. Start by implementing a schedule of regular and consistent contact. Consider creating things that customers come to expect. It might be a magazine or an e-newsletter. Again, every business is different. The point is to begin communicating with customers on a regular and consistent basis.

You need to show your customers what’s going on, what’s happening with your business. However, your messages also need to communicate ongoing value. Customers don’t care about your tenth anniversary—unless it adds value to their lives. The key to remember here is that consistent updates aren’t supposed to be about you; they’re supposed to be about them. Here are some specific tips on how to communicate value.

Call Your Inactive Clients

Try this: Pick up the phone and call ten inactive customers. Seriously. Just try it. You’ll make back the investment you made in this book today, and most likely much more.

Many companies I work with need a lot of help in this area. The unfortunate part is that most of them have systems already in place that provide and keep track of data about customers’ purchasing patterns (e.g., recency, frequency, monetary value). The knowledge is right in front of their noses—certain customers, ones who used to visit regularly, are no longer visiting—and yet these companies are not doing anything about it. Money and profits are just sitting there in the abyss.

Make it part of your policy to call inactive customers regularly. You might even consider designating one person on your team to perform this service; make it this person’s sole job to contact inactive customers.

Let Customers Know They’ve Been Missed

When you reach out to your customers, don’t just immediately go for the jugular and try to close a sale. First, provide value. Sales teams know they must establish a rapport with a client. It’s the same thing when you’re calling or getting in touch with clients with the intent to reactivate them. You need to let them know that they have been missed. You might want to refresh people’s minds about all the great things going on in your organization, or introduce any new content that has been created or launched in their absence.

Websites track people pretty consistently through log-ins and usage data. Discussion forums often have this technology built right in. You may have received an e-mail letting you know that your absence has been noted. I have, on occasion, received a “Noah, we’ve missed you” message if a certain amount of time lapses between interactions with a particular site. Again, high-tech, low-tech, it doesn’t really matter. What matters is that you should be aware of when a customer hasn’t visited in a while so that you can try to be in touch with that customer to say “you’ve been missed.”

Know How Much Contact Is Too Much

Too often organizations are worried about annoying the lost customer. It’s a question I get often: How much contact is too much? How can I make contact without impacting the customer’s perception of my company? Here’s the thing: The single worst thing you can do is not follow up.

In many cases, you don’t really know why a customer left in the first place. There is huge inherent value in getting back in touch to simply discover what happened. In addition, this customer may hold the key to saving other customers. And, finally, let’s suppose that the customer legitimately doesn’t want to do business with your company ever again. Then why are you so concerned? The only cost here is the one associated with your reactivation system’s collateral—whether it’s e-mails, phone calls, or postcards. Whatever the cost, it is still undoubtedly less than the cost of wooing that mythical and fabled new customer.

I would suggest the following as a standard template for customer reactivation. I would suggest at least eight to ten contacts (or touch points) over a period of three months. That works out to one contact every ten days. I don’t think you are overstepping your boundaries here. Let me repeat: For those who are annoyed, they probably weren’t coming back anyway. For those who simply fell out of the habit of doing business with you, they will be pleased by your persistence.

BUILDING EFFECTIVE ATTRITION ALARM SYSTEMS

Whenever I work with subscription sites I like to talk about the Tom Cruise Effect. The Tom Cruise Effect comes from the Mission: Impossible series where it seems as though every five minutes Cruise is dangling from a cable in a room full of red laser beams, each of which is hooked up to an alarm. In your data collection efforts, you need to be building these types of alarm triggers to alert you when a customer has turned around and started to go in another direction. When this happens, the customer is usually letting you know that something has changed and that you need to take some soft action. (Because, remember, as we discussed in Chapter 1, it’s never just one customer. Customers often act like a school of fish; when one fish turns, they all turn.) Companies often wait until it’s too late, and when they finally decide to do something about it, the customer is gone. This all ties back nicely to our discussion of the RFM (recency, frequency, and monetary value) model from Chapter 9.

Here’s a simple example of one such alarm that can be put in place. Suppose a customer pays to sign up for a subscription site. Typically, the majority of customers log onto the website within a day or two of signing up. But what if a particular customer doesn’t log on for a week? That should sound an alarm. That customer needs to be contacted to figure out what’s going on, and why.

This brings me to another important point. Your customer database and customer tracking efforts should also become a way for you to provide better customer service. Here’s one such example: A few years ago, I delivered a talk at a conference for publishers. One of the speakers who followed me was the CEO of a large information publishing company. She said everything about the company’s website and subscription model was running smoothly, except for one group or segment of customers. This group would routinely sign up and then in a month or two file a charge-back with the credit card company. This went on for months and months, and the company couldn’t figure out why. What was going on here? Finally, a manager decided to reach out to these customers. The first person she called was a senior citizen who had lost his password and couldn’t figure out how to retrieve it. As she called more people, this same story repeated itself over and over and over again. This blunder had cost the company hundreds of thousands of dollars. However, by implementing a simple onboarding strategy and process for reaching out to new customers, the company was able to almost erase this one specific issue.

But let’s dig a little deeper into how to save a customer that’s showing signs of defecting. Consider this example: Suppose a customer has purchased from your business every other month for eight months, when suddenly three months pass with no activity. The customer comes back, though, at that point and makes a purchase. Then it’s four months until the next purchase. And then the customer disappears. In this scenario, when should the alarm have sounded? The answer is easy—the very first time the customer missed that purchasing interval! You need to have systems in place to monitor this type of behavior.

In the scenario just described, the next big consideration is this: Does this customer match the archetype of a larger group of customers? Is their behavior similar? Remember the idea of the school of fish. This is immensely important. What if this small segment of customers was really the warning sign for a much larger problem or a shift in customer behavior? You need to find out—and soon!

Many organizations lose customers without having any real rhyme or reason as to why it happened, and those customers simply go away silently into the night. Data about a customer’s recency and frequency of purchasing can provide significant warning signals. Likewise, data about customer behavior can provide similar warning signals. Set the alarms, and then trigger the appropriate communications. The first and most important step is to figure out what has changed. Be proactive.

Don’t wait for the customer to cancel or defect to your competitor. Reach out. Start by asking the customer the very simple question: Are you experiencing any problems with our products and services? This doesn’t require you to provide your staff with any additional training. You don’t need a manual of suggested questions and phrases. You simply need to proactively pick up the phone, start a conversation with your customers, and learn about what’s going on.

From the customer’s perspective, you will look like you’re on the ball. You’ve recognized that the customer hasn’t done business with you as usual. Customers often appreciate this simple gesture. More often than not, simply proactively reaching out is enough to bring back customers. In this case, remember, you are using behavior as an indicator of change. Something has changed, and you need to find out why.

IMPLEMENTING YOUR REACTIVATION SYSTEM

Do you want to learn how to drastically increase your business? I’m not kidding. What if I showed you a process to generate literally thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands or even millions, of dollars today with very little work? It’s possible, and I’m helping my clients do it all the time. All it takes is making reactivation campaigns a standard part of your customer strategy.

Reactivation plans or strategies are the processes we have in place for when we’ve lost the customer. It’s what happens when retention doesn’t work. It’s our best course of action when customers are lost despite our best efforts to build a relationship with them. Of course, we’re always better off retaining customers and focusing on building Evergreen relationships in the first place. However, sometimes, in spite of our best efforts, some customers are going to be lost. Sometimes there’s nothing we can do about that.

But what if there was a simple way to bring them back? What if you could have a system in place to bring lost customers back to you? That’s what reactivation systems are all about. Not only do you need retention systems for keeping customers, and referral systems for generating greater word-of-mouth, new referrals, and testimonials. The next-best system your organization can have in place is a proper reactivation system.

Reactivation might be the single fastest way to generate short-term profits in any business. Your existing customers are, of course, your best and most valuable customers. Your next-best customers are those who were existing customers but who are now lost customers, despite your best efforts. One of the first things I do when working with a client looking to quickly generate profits—and pay for my services—is to help the client create a reactivation campaign.

Another important benefit of reactivating past customers is that they typically cost far less to service than new customers do. They are already familiar with doing business with you. They’ve already gone through your onboarding process (more about this in Chapter 11). You also already know quite a bit about these customers. For example, if you’ve followed any of what I’ve been suggesting in this book, then you should be able to address them personally. Keep in mind that when you do manage to bring a customer back—and by “back” I mean the customer makes a purchase—that customer is, once again, at risk of defecting. Don’t let what happened last time happen again.

Precisely how you undertake a reactivation campaign really depends on your corporate character and customer archetype. You need to use a medium that resonates with your ideal customer archetype. For example, an online retailer may use e-mail for its reactivation campaigns, but a B2B company may call past customers on the phone. In my experience, the best reactivation campaigns use a multitude of mediums to reach lost customers. In addition, reactivation systems are exactly that—they’re a multipronged approach as opposed to a simple one-off endeavor. The key to remember is this: You want to invite your customers to come back and do business with you. Regardless of why they left, you want to reassure them that there are no hard feelings, and that you will welcome them back into your community at any time.

You can easily and effectively implement an effective reactivation system within your business. Simply keep in mind and follow these five key steps:

1.   Rekindle preexisting Evergreen relationships.

2.   Craft your messaging and material carefully.

3.   Deliver your reactivation system effectively.

4.   Track the results.

5.   Monitor your efforts continuously.

Let’s take a moment now and break down each step in greater detail so that you can implement these processes in your organization.

Step One: Rekindle Preexisting Evergreen Relationships

Reactivation is so much easier when you’ve built Evergreen relationships. Assuming you’re following the advice I’ve been suggesting in this book, you have been building effective relationships with your customers. This is crucial. In fact, this is absolutely the single most important part of making a reactivation system work. Regardless of why a customer left, how the customer’s behaviors have changed, or how fancy your reactivation campaign is, everything hinges on the relationship that person had with you when he was still considered an existing customer.

Reactivation campaigns are nothing new. The problem, however, is that some reactivation campaigns don’t work as effectively as they should. This is most common among organizations that didn’t have strong relationships with their customers before they left. These organizations typically haven’t yet carefully embraced and implemented the Evergreen concepts and strategies. These situations pose numerous challenges. In short, during the reactivation campaign trust needs to be (re)established and rapport needs to be (re)built. When you embrace the Evergreen concepts, your ability to bring back customers will increase tremendously.

Step Two: Craft Your Messaging and Material Carefully

Write and deliver your material in a way that matches your corporate character and resonates in a friendly and personal way with your ideal customer archetype. Your message has to do one thing really well, and do it effectively. It has to clearly indicate that you are getting in touch with customers because you care about their business and the relationship you had.

Here’s an example of how not to do it: If you’ve ever been a member of a message board or other online discussion forum, you’ve no doubt received an automated e-mail when you haven’t been to the site in a while. “Our records indicate it’s been a while since you’ve visited us.” Could this message be any less personal? These “reactivation” attempts have absolutely no personality or authenticity. The bottom line here is simple:

Regardless of what your intentions are, if you don’t communicate with people in a way that feels real, they are not going to come back.

Step Three: Deliver Your Reactivation System Effectively

Delivery of your reactivation system is related to sequencing. In other words, how you handle the logistics and actually make it happen. This is the area that causes the most trouble for companies. When is it time to contact a customer? How often should you contact the person? If you’re a B2B company and a sales team is handling your reactivation system, are they expected to make ten calls a day? Or fifty?

Here’s what is usually required: Typically, you are going to need multiple contacts or touch points with customers across a number of different mediums. Sure, some clients will come back after a single e-mail or phone call, but many won’t. You need to give the delivery and sequencing of your system important consideration. Every touch point should also have some sort of call to action. Depending on your content, you may need a small series of “yeses” to bring the person back as a genuine customer, and that’s all the more reason to consider the sequence. You can’t just hand off a list of names and say to your sales representatives, “Call these people.” Remember, you need to set up a proper system and make it an ongoing function of your business.

Suppose, for example, your customer has just returned from a long day at work. The last thing on this customer’s mind is your business. Let’s suppose that within the stack of mail is one of the pieces of your reactivation sequence. Inside the letter, you have a call to action, and the next part of the sequence is determined solely based on what happens from that contact. Let’s suppose your customer simply tosses the envelope in the garbage, without even opening it. If this was your only attempt at customer reactivation, you’ve failed.

Now consider another scenario: Let’s suppose the customer didn’t open the mailing you sent, but he read your e-mail, or answered the phone when you called. You’ll be thankful, then, that you had multiple touch points and didn’t simply give up after the first attempt.

Don’t rely on a single touch point to be an effective reactivation system. It’s not. An effective reactivation system requires multiple communications, often through multiple mediums and multiple steps. (I’ll explain these multiple steps shortly.) Plus, as you’ll see, you also need to be diligently tracking your results to ensure you know where a customer is within the system.

Step Four: Track the Results

As with any sales and marketing efforts, you need to track your results. I could write an entire chapter on the importance of testing, because once again it’s an area of business that is far too often overlooked. You need to document your attempts. What’s working? What’s not working? What could be improved?

Of course, the most important thing is to track where different customers are in the sequence, and what needs to happen next. A couple of paragraphs ago I said you need to have multiple steps in your process, right? Well, what if you have a six-step reactivation sequence and a client comes back after the first contact? Then you need to ensure that this client doesn’t get the next five touch points. Remember, the most important part of embracing the concepts of Evergreen within your business is to simulate, in as honest a manner as possible, a one-on-one dialogue between your company and your customer. From a customer’s perspective, it doesn’t feel authentic if that person keeps getting e-mails and calls after she has returned to doing business with your organization. Keep it real!

Step Five: Monitor Your Efforts Continuously

I hope you’re not getting the impression that a reactivation campaign is a onetime thing. You need to build this system or process into your business, and it needs to be ongoing. In addition, you need to follow through every time.

If you’re a small one-person shop, it may feel too hectic to write the e-mails, send the letters, and make the phone calls. You need to have systems in place to make this manageable and effective. I helped one small-business client build a system where every day she could easily handle the process on her own. Larger companies should look at tools, such as Infusionsoft or Microsoft’s Autopilot, that allow you to build follow-up sequences that can be triggered to start automatically or with the click of a button. The important thing is that this process should be ongoing, not a start-and-stop operation. It should become so fluid that you can easily manage it alongside your normal daily operations.

MANAGING YOUR EXPECTATIONS ABOUT REACTIVATION

Some companies have misguided expectations about reactivation. One client, for example, came to me with a list of more than 3,000 lost customers, none of whom had made a purchase in the previous twelve months. Most companies would consider this to be a dead list. In fact, most companies wouldn’t spend any time at all to follow up with these customers. We, however, built a simple reactivation system and began running it against this list of lost customers.

After three months I was back in the client’s office with both the marketing manager, who was responsible for the campaign, and the CEO of the company. The marketing manager said, “Noah, we’ve been running the campaign for two months and only 140 customers have come back.” Now, I’ve never been particularly good at math, but I quickly knew that 140 out of 3,000 represented a 5 percent response rate in two months. So I asked a few off-topic questions about past marketing campaigns and how well they did. Typically, the company generated about a 2 percent or 3 percent return on its efforts to generate new customers. Next, I asked what the cost had been to implement the reactivation system. In this case, it was literally pennies on the dollars. (To be exact, the company spent about $3,000 in labor and the physical expense to print and mail the letter.) So then I asked what, on average, were these reactivated customers spending? On average, their first purchase back was about $350. It is worth noting that we already knew that each customer of this company typically makes that purchase twice a year.

Then I asked the magic question: “In two months you’ve spent $3,000 to generate $50,000 in additional revenue. What exactly isn’t working?” The CEO just smiled.

Keep in mind, this snapshot doesn’t take into effect that various customers were at different stages in the sequence; we knew the system was working, and it was still expected to run for an additional month. More money was certainly coming! This snapshot also doesn’t take into effect that the company is now more focused on building relationships with its customers; it is now Evergreen.

The CEO had smiled because there is simply no rational way to argue with these types of results. I thought for a moment he was going to tell the marketing manager to take a hike. Sure, implementing a reactivation campaign is not as glamorous as implementing a new marketing campaign. It’s not as glitzy as creating a funny YouTube video with the hopes of it going viral. But, gee, what would you rather have? A few pats on the back, some artificial likes, a couple random mentions on Twitter, or money in the bank?

Reactivating lost customers isn’t easy—because it takes time, energy, and resources away from the new customer acquisition addition. But it is simple—because with some focus on who left, and why, there’s a good opportunity you can bring them back.