The Plan For Getting A Lost Customer Back!

On average, and for a variety of reasons, most businesses will lose about 20% of their existing customers, clients or patients each and every year. Customers come and go. It’s simply a fact of life. 
 

Some of the reasons for customer attrition (customer losses) are unavoidable but others are in the complete control of the business owner.

According to a recent survey by Sales and Marketing Executives International, customers stop buying for the following reasons:

1. 1% die
2. 3% move away
3. 5% develop other friendships
4. 9% leave for competitive reasons
5. 14% are dissatisfied with the product or service
6. 68% leave because they were treated with indifference, disrespect, apathy or neglectful behaviours on the part of employees of the business organisation with which they interacted 

82% of a business’s customers leaving because they are unhappy is not good news in anyone’s book.

But what is good news is that because 68% of people leave through indifference, with a bit of ‘hand-holding’ and ‘cuddling’ some of those customers can be ‘won’ back.

Each name on your past- or lapsed-customer list represents the marketing cost to acquire each one in the first place and all the hours upon hours of your time spent to convert them into customers.

Plus, according to the US Office of Consumer Affairs, it costs six times more to acquire a customer than it does to keep an existing one. Therefore your past-customer list becomes  even  more   valuable,   not only because the business should already ‘have’ them, but because those past customers already know the business, which makes them far more likely to buy again.

Don’t think of them as ‘past’ customers. Think of them as ‘inactive’ customers with the potential to come back and buy again and many more times in the future. But they won’t do it on their own – not most of the time anyway.

No, you have to get proactive and start working that customer list with a solid plan and goals for creating more sales using those valuable names.

It’s likely you won’t have contacted the names on your past- or lapsed-customer list for a while, or if a lot of those customers have not come back on their own for a long time, you need to institute a ‘lost-customer reactivation strategy’.

One of the best ways to get past or lapsed customers back is with a good letter (a ‘Customer Reactivation Letter’). But whatever you do, put a plan in place for winning them back. It will be time well spent and you’ll be surprised at the results!