Direct mail pro Paul Bobnak from Who’s Mailing What! was recently our guest for an action-packed session focused on driving retention and winback success using direct mail. Discussion topics included strategies for using offline and online tactics together to retain your best customers and winback those you may have lost.
If you didn’t have a chance to join the webinar you can quickly get the key takeaways below, or watch the recording to get all the content.
Customer retention and reactivation is a big focus for marketing teams as it’s more affordable to keep current customers than acquire new ones. But with our changing economy and changing budgets and priorities for consumers, it’s often difficult to keep or win back churned customers.
This stat comes from the marketing firm, Invest, and highlights how marketing investments, such as a high converting website and a powerful CRM or database tool can be worth a larger upfront investment as it’ll pay off in the long run instead of investing in one-off tactics to chase after new customers.
One major component of customer experience? Segmentation!
“Using data to segment your marketing campaigns, whether they be digital or direct mail, means being able to send targeted messages to the right audience at the right time. It’s key to improving ROI. Using data about your customers, from browsing history to past purchases, can help you trigger those cross-sells and upsells and provide the most compelling offers,” said Courvoisier, Lob’s director of content and host for the webinar.
With 52% of consumers expecting direct mail to be personalized, you have to have good, clean data to create campaigns that drive conversions.
“You have to do your homework and make sure that your messaging and offers are relevant to your customers. You have to meet their wants and needs to bring them home,” said Bobnak.
As marketers, we often focus on creating memorable customer journeys that lead to that first purchase. But we have to work just as hard to engage customers and encourage repeat purchases.
Bobnak and Courvoisier talked about omnichannel tactics working together to drive repeat purchases, such as sending an email to customers letting them know something special was arriving in their mailbox soon.
It’s critical for marketers to focus on customer reactivation. Bobnak noted a statistic that found, “Loyal customers spend 67% more than prospective ones. It makes financial sense to focus on reactivation.”
Bobnak also discussed how marketers can execute customer retention campaigns, either trigger-based or using drip campaigns. Both of these strategies can be done on direct or digital channels. The key is to dive into the analytics to understand what channels and messaging are most effective.
Courvoisier posed the question: How do you see direct mail practitioners effectively using data to win back customers?
“Start by looking at the data you have on your inactive users by using an RFM analysis - that stands for Recency, Frequency, and Monetary Metrics. In other words, how recently did they buy, how many times have they bought, and how much they have spent,” said Bobnak. He added, “The beauty of direct mail is measurability. You can compare the cost and performance of your campaigns with a great degree of precision.”
To sum up, data is your best friend for creating retention and reactivation campaigns.
“We have more access to data than we ever had in the past. Remember 10 years ago? You couldn’t get to data. You were flying blind. Thanks to integrations, we can see more clearly and better power our marketing campaigns,” said Courvoisier.
Dive deep into the topic of using direct mail marketing for customer retention by downloading your copy of our latest eBook: The Modern Marketer’s Guide to Customer Retention Using Direct Mail. If reactivation marketing campaigns are a bigger part of your strategy, get your copy of The Modern Marketer’s Guide to Reactivating Customers with Direct Mail.
