You’ve attracted your clients, converted them to your cause, but some of them no longer respond to your messages. It could just be inactive clients simply waiting to be woken up by your good care. Your inactive clients aren’t actually lost clients – quite the contrary!
It’s about contacts who no longer respond to your mailings, who have not yet purchased/made a repeat purchase in a defined time period, or who have not engaged with your company. Unfortunately, this indifference reduces campaign efficiency (decrease in open rate and clicks) and could therefore tarnish your reputation with ISPs.
Far from being marginal, this inactivity today affects between 20 and 50% of database contacts. Digitalization facilitates consumer volatility in a highly competitive environment. The health crisis has also been able to create a kind of natural inactivity. For example, some marketers were forced to stop sending newsletters when businesses shut down. At the end of the lockdown, the challenge to wake up this e-mail base after the crisis will be even greater, especially
knowing that the transformation rate of an inactive contact is up to 10 times higher than that of a potential client.
What strategy should you then adopt to reactivate your inactive contacts? First of all, define your inactivity criteria (e.g. last date of purchase, lack of responsiveness to your campaigns, stagnant loyalty points balance). This will allow you to figure out which inactive contacts you should reactivate according to their potential ROI. The more your inactive contacts will be recent or resemble your active contacts, the more they can be woken up successfully.
Then you can put your inactive contacts into segments according to their seniority, the recency of their purchases or their last behaviors observed in order to send them the right messages.
For example, you can differentiate buyers from non-buyers, and among them, clickers from non-clickers. If you have clicks without purchases, you might need to rethink your landing pages. If you don’t have clicks but your non-openers are active contacts on other channels, you might need to rethink your channel mix or your newsletter content.
The idea is to bet on client knowledge to be able to send personalized campaigns at the right time and on the right channel according to client expectations and preferences. To this end, feel free to start your contact renewal by asking your inactive contacts to fill out a preference form: when do they want to receive your content? At what frequency? To which address e-mail or phone number?
Marketing automation scenarios are the perfect solution to facilitate contact renewal. Progressive, iterative and conditioned, they help reactivate your contacts
gradually and adapt to the responses of your recipients. According to their purchase
history and preferences, you can send a more relationship-oriented message before
pushing a new product/offer/service that encourages repeat purchasing. If in
the end, despite all your renewal efforts your inactive clients remain dormant,
isolate them in order to stop contacting them. This will help you clean up your
database and maintain your deliverability.