What if I told you that one in every ten customers that you were sure that were lost will come back and make another purchase if you simply send them an email? Well, that’s the statistics we found in our data of over one thousands eCommerce stores and millions of shoppers.
As you can see, merchants who have launched “inactive customers” campaigns were able to bring back almost 10% of customers that have not purchased for a very long time (more than 60 days).
How Remarkety brings back inactive customers
“Inactive customers” is one of the many email remarketing campaigns that are offered by Remarkety. The emails are sent automatically to customers who have not purchased for a predefined period of time (e.g. after 30 days, 60 days, 90 days, etc.). As part of the email that is sent to these clients, merchants can add coupons, which have proven to be highly effective (usually doubling or tripling the conversion rates).
How to identify your inactive customers
This may seem trivial, but, believe me, it’s not. Every type of business may have a different characterization of inactive customers. For example, if a consumer of ink cartridges has not purchased another cartridge in the past two months, should he/she be considered an inactive customer? Of course not. Here is a generalization of how to classify inactive customers:
- Consumables – consumables businesses should know the recurring periods for purchases. For example, a pet shop should know that a bag of a certain dog food usually lasts one month. In this case, when a customer that purchases the dog food every month stops purchasing on a certain month or has not purchased for a couple of months, this customer should be considered an inactive customer.
- Seasonal – the fashion industry is generally seasonal (summer, fall, winter, and spring). So for example, if a customer bought items from the summer collection and then has not purchased from the fall collection, should he/she be considered an inactive customer? In this case it depends on the approach. If we do not want to push too hard, we may choose to consider as inactive customers those that have “skipped” at least two seasons.
- Other – there are many other examples of how to identify inactive customers. To do it effectively, you need to analyze the purchasing data of your customers and then build a “formula” or “rule” – for example – customers that have purchased more than once and have not purchased during the last 90 days.
One of the features that Remarkety offers is a recommendations engine. This engine constantly analyzes your store’s data and recommends the creation of new campaigns or the fine-tuning of existing ones. As part of this analysis it will recommend the optimal periods for sending “inactive customers” campaigns.
Note that although any customer that has purchased before can be considered an inactive customer, for the purpose of applying various marketing tactics, we suggest considering as inactive customers only customers that have purchased more than once. Occasional customers or “one time” customers have other characteristics that should be addressed differently.
One time may not be enough
Our statistics show that sending one email may not be enough. Many of our users send an email after 60 days of inactivity, then another after 90 days, and so on. Sending multiple emails is important and effective. In fact, in most cases, you should engage with your customer several times before he/she decides to purchase again.
