Many businesses start out well, picking up momentum in the early months or years but suddenly find they’re bleeding customers. This especially has been a concern for many businesses that are losing customers left and right with a recession looming ahead.
If your business is facing this situation, you need to get those customers back again since everything in your business, starting from revenue to growth, brand recognition, and brand reputation depends on them.
Fortunately, there are many ways for a business to win back clients as long as they approach those clients the right way. Here are five winning strategies to win back lost customers and help your business improve in the process.
Ask Customers Why They Left
A customer can leave your brand for a wide variety of reasons, so there’s no point in wasting time guessing what they might be. Instead, the best way to find out the answer is often to ask the customers directly. Also, You can’t start strategizing how to win back your clients if you don’t know why they left.
There are multiple ways to reach out to your customers – sending out surveys to lost clients, emails, calls, or other ways to get more information on why your clients left. Once you have the data, you can use that information to identify problems in your organization’s customer retention and brainstorm ways to get your customers back based on that information.
Create Social Marketing Winback Campaigns
Your lost customers and potential new ones are likely to be on social media, making social media marketing campaigns a good place to start winning back your lost customers. Once you know why your old customers left, you can start developing a social marketing campaign highlighting how your company has now solved the pain points that resulted in your clients leaving.
Some effective marketing strategies that could work here include social media campaigns and ads, boosting client engagement, building social networks, and using data like click-through rates and conversion rates to narrow in on the most effective social marketing strategies. If you don’t have a dedicated digital marketer in your business, then you can opt to hire an agency to help you out.
Send Personalized Offers
This is something that many small and medium-sized businesses are incapable of doing depending on their product/service and financial situation. Not all customers will have a common pain point as to why they left your brand to begin with. Certain types of customers are more likely to back you if you give them a personalized offer based on their needs.
Depending on the size of your business, you can respond to lost customers by giving them something for free as an apology for the dissatisfaction/inconvenience they feel, giving them a steep offer, or sending complimentary gifts on special days like their birthdays.
Develop a Win-Win Strategy
When trying to win back lost customers, understand that you won’t be able to convert all of them, as meeting every individual condition is impossible.
So focus on what you and your customers’ goals have in common and use that to find a middle ground that is acceptable for your customers and feasible for your business. This is where the art of negotiation comes into play.
If your business provides a service such as insurance, some negotiation is a must. Some common negotiation tips include coming armed with knowledge about their pain points, establishing terms and conditions for the negotiations, keeping long-term relationship goals in mind, and more.
Reach Out to Current Clients Before They Leave
You’ve probably heard of the old saying, ‘prevention is better than cure.’ This applies not only in regards to health but businesses as well – it’s better to retain your current customers properly instead of losing them and going through all the effort to win them back. This involves constantly keeping in touch with them, so they feel comfortable sharing their opinions with your brand.
Some of the most common ways to retain clients before losing them include checking in with clients regularly, addressing customer concerns promptly, regularly communicating with your clients, and working with your supervisors to expedite solving customer concerns promptly.
Nerves of Steel
Losing customers is something that even the biggest brands out there have to deal with, so there’s nothing to panic about if your business suddenly finds itself in such a position.
Instead of panicking, you should focus on gathering actionable data and using that data to create a solid plan to win back lost customers. By using the five strategies discussed above, you can do this easily.
Just keep in mind that a marketing campaign using this strategy will have to run separately alongside your regular campaigns. So it’s best you save up a bit for the extra marketing expenses. That way your marketing efforts to win back lost customers won’t affect your primary marketing campaigns.
With all that wrapped up, good luck on your journey to win back lost customers. And if your business is new and hasn’t reached that point yet, you now know what to do when your business inevitably reaches that point. With a solid plan in hand, winning back lost customers will be much quicker.