Reactivating lapsed customers with their own history rather than a bulk blast
The list of people who bought once and never returned is usually the largest addressable audience a store owns, and the one it treats worst.
Most stores have more lapsed customers than active ones. The standard treatment is a quarterly "we miss you" email to everybody, which performs about as well as it deserves to.
Curating per person, not per campaign
A lapsed customer is not a generic lapsed customer. The reason to come back is different for each of them, and it is already in their record.
- They browsed something and never bought it - show them that.
- They bought a consumable and are past the point it would have run out - remind them of the same thing.
- They bought everything they were going to buy in one category - show them what your other customers bought next.
- Nothing above applies - fall back to what actually sells, but know that you are falling back.
Why the fallback matters
The temptation is to make every message look personalised. The honest version records which of those reasons applied, so afterwards you can see which rung of the ladder actually earned revenue. Usually the specific ones do, dramatically, and knowing that is what tells you where to improve the data.
Never send the same product three times in one message because the catalogue had variants. It reads as a bulk blast, and a spam complaint from a lapsed customer costs more than the order was worth.
What to do next
Count how many customers bought exactly once, more than ninety days ago, and are still reachable. Then work out what that group would be worth at your normal repeat rate. It is usually a larger number than the campaign you are currently planning.
Read next
Shadow mode: see every conversion you would have sent, before you send one