How to select the target market for a win back campaign:
Selecting the right target market for your win back campaign will depend heavily upon the marketing channel you will use:
- If your campaign will leverage email, there will be little cost associated with the campaign, but you will need to factor in your email service provider SPAM score, if you cast the net to individuals who don’t generally open your emails
- If you are looking to run a traditional direct mail or outbound calling campaign, postage, print and labour costs will be relatively high, so smart targeting will be needed to ensure a positive return on your investment
For traditional campaigns, marketers tend to select individuals based on previous purchase behaviour (the recency, frequency and monetary value, known as “RFM,” of previous purchases) and more recent engagement with your other marketing communications and/or your sales team.
The challenge: Where to draw the line for a win back campaign:
Often, marketers find that traditional win back campaigns targeting people that have not purchased in a significant time frame are not cost effective. This is based on 2 factors:
- The data will have eroded in quality, as people may have moved home, changed telephone number or deceased since last purchasing from you
- If you have already tried marketing to them since they previously purchased from you and they did not respond, there is even less chance that they will respond this time
While cleansing your data, or validating against third party change of address or deceased registers may be cost-prohibitive, it is likely that there are still people in the target market that can be won back, if you use the right techniques.
How Dataphoria overcome the win back campaign challenge:
Leveraging third-party databases that highlight more recent purchasing behaviour of individuals elsewhere can boost the effectiveness of a win back campaign. This is because matching to recent purchase behaviour validates that the contact details you have on file are correct and demonstrates that the individuals are still direct responsive. Through matching the lapsed customers to external databases, we are able to score records by:
- Affinity to your brand (cross-over between your file and the related contributor file)
- How recently they have purchased
- How active they are elsewhere in market
By targeting only individuals with higher scores, we are often able to extend the breadth of a win back campaign beyond time frames that have worked for our clients before.
You can learn more about customer reactivation here. Don’t forget to ensure your campaign is set up to work within related Privacy and calling laws.
