Keeping clients is one of the essential factors for company success. A satisfied customer is three times more willing to buy again than a new one. This is why you must learn how to recover lost clients.
According to an analysis by Bain & Company shows the following infographic, acquiring a new client is between 6 and seven times more expensive than retaining current clients. As if that were not enough, with just a 5% increase in investment to keeping clients, benefits can be achieved that go from 95%.
A satisfied customer will reduce price sensitivity and increase repeat purchases. However, the acquisition of clients is still the primary objective of most digital marketing campaigns. Beyond the techniques that focus on customer retention. Or how to recover lost clients.
According to the management of commercial networks study in Spain by IESE Business School, loyalty policies are only used by 33% of companies. Besides, 43% of brands still do not measure the degree of loyalty of their clients. And only 21% of businesses have specific protocols for client recovery. A number that should be increased to achieve successful companies that take care of their clients.
How to recover lost clients
What seems obvious is that all brands face the loss of clients for many reasons. Among them the main ones are:
- Receive an indifferent treatment.
- Not be satisfied with your products and services.
- Be attracted to the competition after comparing prices or thanks to offers and discounts.
- Search for optional products.
Very few companies have strategies to recover lost customers. Below we break down ten steps with the ultimate goal of defining how to recover lost clients:
1.- Discover the problem and identify the reasons for the exit
It’s essential to know why they have left. What has been the problem, if there had? Or identify the causes of why a user has ceased to be a client of the company.
If you don´t find the main problems with the progress of your clients, it´s difficult not only that you can recover them. The worst part is that there will be many other clients who can leave you for the same reasons.
It’s crucial to implement techniques that give you that knowledge. The easiest: ask the clients who leave you to tell you the reasons. Some brands already have forms that make it easy to discover why a client stops being one.
2.- Examine the reasons for the clients lost
However, it’s not sufficient to discover the problem. If you don´t do anything afterwards, it will be difficult for you to correct it. It´s easy to know that sometimes it will be problems that are not easy to solve. For example, if a client decides to go to the competition for the price, it is likely that you cannot do much more than knowing the reason.
However, when analyzing the mistakes that have been made, there will be issues that you can try to modify. If the reason why the customer leaves you has to do with a miserable experience, you should put everything try to resolve it as best as possible.
This is why is so essential to solving those issues that have a solution. Only in this way will it be possible to recover the lost customer. Of course, in this case, it is necessary that you communicate to the client remedy the mistake. And ask for a new chance.
Before that, make sure that the reasons for your departure have been corrected. Otherwise, you will have lost a client irreversibly and permanently.
3.- Identify the client who has left
In the same way that it’s important to use techniques such as the Buyer Person or the Empathy Map of the client to attract the right public, a good strategy that helps you define how to recover lost clients is to identify the clients that abandon you.
Are they all of the same sex? Are they included in a specific age range? Do they have the same behaviours? An in-depth analysis of the clients that abandon you can help you generate audience patterns that should be worked in another way.
For example, if you have identified that users who don´t open your emails within a particular time, end up stopping buying your products, you can propose strategies that get your attention before you leave. For example, with an SMS marketing campaign associated with an adapted landing page.
4.- Segment the market
It is never too late to do it. Much of the success of current digital marketing campaigns is because a proper segmentation of the audience you are targeting. The same applies to client recovery.
It´s unlikely that you can recover everyone. That´s why it´s vital you define an appropriate strategy for the types of essential clients. Based on the Pareto Principle that establishes that 20% of clients represent 80% of the business volume of any company, it is necessary that you identify the 20% that you are interested in recovering.
If you have limited resources, focus your efforts to recover the most interesting, either by the volume of your purchases. Or for the frequency. Or, even, because they have been good prescribers.
5.- Study the competition
Do you know what your competitors invest to try to steal your clients? Do you know the messages they use? And the reasons that they use to prove their products? Analyzing the competition is very important to make any strategy that has as its axis actions to define how to recover lost clients.
Using tools like SEMrush you can investigate not only the actions, messages, and creativities of your competitors.
Once you´ve analyzed your rivals, you can act accordingly. In some cases, it will be necessary to implement improvements that are related to your offers. A proper analysis will not only allow you to define how to recover lost clients, but it will also open opportunities for you to launch for your clients.
6.- Strengthen your client service
One of the leading causes of the clients left a company is poor client service. Something that is entirely controllable by your business.
To solve this problem, you must adequately train all the members of your company to deal with clients. Some brands make the mistake of leaving client service in the hands of others. When managing situations with annoying clients and documenting solutions is one of the keys to recovering lost customers.
Learning from companies like Zappos, referring to excellent client service, will help you find ways to recover lost clients. And, at the same time, it will make it more difficult for other current clients left you because of inadequate attention.
7.- Improve the quality of products and services
On certain occasions, the only possible way out is to improve the quality of your offer to attract the clients you`ve lost. In that case, it is interesting to consider their contributions. Again, a survey to find out the reasons for their abandonment and how they would improve the products is the basis for building a client recovery strategy based on the improvement of production.
8.- Offers personalized benefits
If you know that one type of client has a frequency of purchase over others, it doesn´t hurt to encourage him to come back with some concrete benefits that you know will interest them. Among them, you can include commercial offers or even non-material benefits that make them understand that they are particular clients for your company.
9.- Establish direct contact with clients
On many occasions, the best way to recover a lost client is to establish a direct connection through one of the available channels. Many people need to feel important. And a phone call or a personal email can make the barriers that have caused the client to be lost fall.
However, for this, it´s necessary that you design an adequate communication strategy that reflects the way you should communicate with these customers. And that includes policies that make the client make contact with the brand again and then seek to reconsider.
10.- Be consistent
It will not help you to solve specific problems if others arise that you had not taken into account. Consistency is essential to avoid being abandoned by your current customers. And to recover those who, for whatever reasons, had decided to stop buying your products.
One of the best ideas you can put into practice is an automated email marketing campaign that sends emails when specific assumptions made. That can be positive (for example, when purchase made, it’s interesting that the user receives an email within days of receiving the product to know if it has been to their liking) or negative (when a shopping cart abandoned in e-commerce or when there is a complaint from a customer to the Customer Service Department).
