How to Re-Engage Lost Customers: 4 Client Engagement Ideas

Your existing customers are one of your most precious assets. However, reconnecting with them after they haven’t opened your website or bought one of your products for a while is not as easy as it sounds.

We know you are all wondering how to re-engage your lost customers for better retention, so let’s dive right into it.

How to Re-Engage Lost Customers: 4 Ideas

1. Personalize Your Approach
2. Provide Excellent Customer Service
3. Host an Event
4. Share User-Generated Content

1. Personalize Your Approach

You can use your CMS and other marketing technologies to improve communication with your customers by personalizing your relationship with them. By doing this, you will most notably see:

• An Improved Sales Process. Delivering qualified leads to your sales team will make the sales process more efficient.
• Engaging Content. Create content that appeals to customers and keeps them engaged. That also increases customer loyalty.
• Repeat Customers. Personalization will enhance your brand, which means customers will continue to buy from you.
• Brand Ambassadors. Personalizing your approach makes customers happy. And happy customers are excellent ambassadors. They will talk good about your company and want to share their experience with their friends.

Providing personalized experiences is not something new. Bellboys or hotel receptionists often learn your name and offer you a complimentary coffee while you wait for one of their services.

Or, if you’re a regular at a coffee shop, the people that work there will often recognize you and write your name on the cup long before you order.

It’s all about tailoring the approach to your target audience. The following are methods for personalizing the approach with your customers and engaging with them in the process.

Provide Answers Upfront

Internet-savvy customers can find answers on their own, but only if they have access to them. It is why providing answers upfront is crucial nowadays.

As an example, look at the Adobe Illustrator Learn and Support page. The content is perfectly tailored for their upcoming users. The Get Started section helps users start learning, while the Tutorials section focuses on becoming better with the tool. There is also a Troubleshooting section for people that want to resolve a given problem quickly.

A knowledge base is an excellent way to reduce support requests, but at the same time, help your customers help themselves. It also provides you with more information about your customers and the problems that they face when using or learning to use your product.

Put Customer Data to Use

Through analytics, you can spot the trends and customer’s buying patterns. Analyzing data will give you more opportunities to provide your customers with what they want at the right time.

If you know your customers’ interests, you can send important reminders and resources to help them enjoy your products. Data will also help you personalize your marketing and sales approaches.

Unify the Experience Across Channels

The next step to a successful personalization is creating an omnichannel customer experience. Let’s take Apple’s support page as an example. They make it possible for both customers and customer service reps to resolve problems by using multiple channels.

Customers can detail their issues and through a phone call or browse the knowledge base. You can bet that when Apple’s support reps call you, they are fully prepared with solutions.

Big retailers such as H&M use AI technology to deliver a tailored shopping experience. H&M has launched a chatbot that works as a virtual personal stylist. The bot asks questions and comes up with recommendations based on the customer’s choices.

The bot collects the data that customers provide and adds the other data that H&M has about a specific customer, such as his/her browsing history, email messaging, purchasing history, and more. With that, the customer’s profile is more personalized, and H&M can provide better suggestions next time.

Collect Feedback

Feedback, just like every other type of data, can help you personalize the customer experience. So, how can you collect valuable feedback from your customers?

The easiest way is through an NPS (Net Promoter Score) survey. An NPS survey will measure the willingness of customers to recommend your company’s products or services to others. All you have to do is ask a question and let customers grade the answer from 0-10.

Once you collect the answers, you can categorize your customers into three groups:

0 – 6: Detractors – Not satisfied or unhappy with your service.

7 – 8: Neutrals – Satisfied to some extent but receptive to other offers from competitors.

9-10: Promoters – They’re your brand’s evangelists.

With this type of data, you can segment your customers and personalize the follow-up communication with them. For example, for:

• Detractors. Acknowledge their problem and ask them for more details to ensure that you can provide the right solution.
• Neutrals. Ask what they enjoyed about the product and what they didn’t. Where necessary, send them a special offer.
• Promoters. Ask them what they would say if they had to suggest your product or service to friends.

NPS surveys are an effective way to get feedback from your customers. Not only you will obtain valuable insight, but you will also show your customers that their opinions matter to you.

2. Provide Excellent Customer Service

The better your customer service is, the higher your chances of retaining customers. When it comes to customer service, quality is everything.

73% of customers state that customer experience is an important purchasing decision factor, however just 49% say that companies provide a good customer experience.

A considerable aspect of excellent customer service is making customers feel appreciated. Customers like it when they are listened to and when their importance to the brand is shown.

Excellent customer service creates customer happiness, which can be a massive advantage over your competitors.

A big part of knowing how to provide customer support and service is understanding your customers and how they use your products. Let’s take Slack, a work collaboration tool, as an example.

The tool works perfectly as workplace communication. But, just like with every other technology, outages can occur, many of them reported on the Twittersphere by companies that use the product.

Slack are aware of that, and they’re right there, keeping users updated and offering their help. They’re proactively replying to every complaint, request, and answering questions about the product on Twitter.

Another example of excellent customer service is Zappos, clothing, and shoes online retail giant. They direct their efforts towards recognizing how integral customers are for the company.

Zappos even runs a tally that shows how many ‘Thank You’ notes and gifts are sent to ensure that the entire team is on the same page.

Tony Hsieh, Zappos’s CEO, explains:

“Most call centers are set up by policies, and so the actual person that’s answering the phone can’t do anything. So we generally try to stay away from policies, we ask our reps to do whatever they feel is the right thing to do for the customer and the company. And that’s uncomfortable for many reps that come from other call centers. We have to untrain their bad habits.”

If you want to reach Slack or Zappos’s level of customer service, keep in mind the following:

Know Your Product: For excellent customer service, you need to know your product. Know the most common questions customers ask and the answers that keep customers satisfied.

Stay Friendly: Remember that you serve your customers. A warm greeting and a smile should be the first thing they see and hear when asking for your help. A friendly tone is easily recognizable through the phone, so make sure you’re ready to deliver your service in such a manner.

• Be Grateful. No matter the type of business, being grateful for every transaction is one of the best paths to a proper customer service strategy.
• Train Your Team. Make sure that your entire team understands the way they should interact with and help your customers. Train your employees and provide them with what they need to deliver an excellent customer experience.
• Be Respectful. Handle each of your customer service tasks courteously and respectfully. Never let negative emotions take over when you interact with your customers.
• Listen Carefully. Listening is essential when it comes to customer service. Listen to what your customers are saying, as well as what they don’t say. In other words, hear the spoken and the unsaid and figure out how to address both.
• Be Responsive. There’s nothing worse for a brand than to leave a customer who needs help waiting. All inquiries must be addressed quickly, even if it is a common and general question that customers can find the answer anywhere. A quick response is always better than ignoring customers.
• Use Feedback. Analyze the customer feedback, discover opportunities, and make the required changes.

If you do everything right, your brand will become known for providing top-notch customer service.

3. Host an Event

Everyone loves event invitations, especially customers. Hosting an event is an excellent way to convince your existing customers to reunite with your brand in person.

Rent a venue and plan your event. If you host an event several times per year, make sure that you communicate with your customers beforehand.

Expand the Community

Events are not only for networking or seeing a big industry name. You need to use your event to share ideas and build a community. Here are some ways to break the ice and get the creativity going on your event:

Make it experiential. Last year at SXSW, Dell used experiential marketing to increase their brand awareness. Their “Are You Smarter Than a Mathlete” competition gathered students to compete against adults in a brain battle.

The winners won Dell laptops and a donation to a charity of their choice, also sponsored by Dell. With this, Dell engaged with the event attendees and built a more significant community as a result.

Offer interaction with experts. People would love a chance to meet experts. Rather than having a static booth, consider having experts themselves provide an onsite demo for the attendees.

Extend the community after the event. You can create a Facebook group where attendees can interact and share their ideas until the next event occurs.

Invite Influencers

Because they already have loyal fans, inviting influencers will make those fans appreciate your event as well. Typically consumers put more trust in influencers over advertisements. The following tips will help you use influencers to promote your brand.

Run Contests: It’s an excellent way to let attendees interact with influencers, and vice versa. For example, you can run a contest where you give away VIP tickets to lucky attendees to meet the influencer in person for a VIP chat.

Use Social Media: Promote your event on social media and get both the influencers and the attendees involved on the platforms. Social media will keep everyone engaged with your event.

4. Share User-Generated Content

User-generated content (UGC) is another good way to promote your business and engage with your current customers. It will help you gain more customers without investing in new content. UGC is cost-effective and requires minimum effort.

The content that you create can help you build trust. But, actual examples of how your customers benefit from your products and services will help you enhance that trust and build rapport.

UGC will encourage potential customers to learn more about your brand and visit your social media accounts and website. To get it right, it’s always the best to learn from the best. For that reason, here are UGC examples that can inspire you to create your campaign.

Milka: Cookies Tour

The chocolate brand Milka started a contest where they asked their customers to share their best moments with Milka Cookies. Their fans could enter the competition using the Facebook camera filter app and the branded hashtag.

Aerie

Aerie is a lingerie brand that uses marketing to promote a positive and realistic message for women. For this purpose, they use UGC in their social media feeds, with the #AerieReal as their most prominent example.

https://www.instagram.com/p/B218Lizh-hr/

They never rework the photos of their models, and they ask for their customers not to retouch their photos either. To encourage more photo sharing, Aerie also donates $1 for every submitted photo to NEDA.

Adobe

Adobe uses the hashtag #Adobe_Perspective to display its software abilities and connect with the users at the same time.

With this, Adobe users can showcase their work while Adobe gets free content and increased brand recognition.

How to Re-Engage Lost Customers: Wrapping Up

In summary, we’ve shown you some of the best ways to re-engage your customers for better retention and transform them into long-lasting clients. Customers will only stay with you if you give them compelling enough reasons for it.

Keep in mind that the better your re-engagement methods are, the more connected your customers will feel to your brand. With our unmatched B2B brand marketing, we can help you reconnect with your customers, and win over tons of new ones.