But customer acquisition isn’t the be-all and end-all of building a successful business. In fact, examples abound of companies that were quite successful at acquiring customers but not very good at making money.

That’s not entirely surprising giving that today, many markets, from retail to financial services, are more competitive than they have ever been, which is reflected in higher-than-ever customer acquisition costs. While savvy companies might be able to outperform their peers by, for instance, building a better digital advertising engine, the reality is that customer acquisition is generally expensive and getting more expensive.

For this reason, customer retention is increasingly critical. How critical? Consider some stats:

  • Increasing customer retention rates by just 5% increases profits by 25% to 95%. (Bain & Co).
  • Attracting a new customer costs five times as much as keeping an existing one. (Lee Resources 2010)
  • Globally, the average value of a lost customer is $243. (KISSmetrics)
  • The probability of selling to an existing customer is 60 – 70%. The probability of selling to a new prospect is 5-20% (Marketing Metrics)

The good news for companies is that thanks to digital channels, there are more ways than ever to retain customers, including even customers that have gone into hibernation.

An excellent example of the ability to re-engage dormant customers was provided by American retailer Macy’s this past holiday shopping season. As detailed by Internet Retailer’s April Berthene, Macy’s turned to email and developed a strategy for re-engaging shoppers who hadn’t opened or clicked on an email recently.

The retailer’s “deep activation” campaign employed segmentation; Macy’s created five segments, such as shoppers who haven’t opened an email in the last 13 months and past Macys.com purchasers who never opened or clicked a link in a promotional email. The emails sent to these segments contained more white space than its normal emails, and contained messages such as “Are you there?” 

Most importantly, instead of trying to go from 0 to 100 real quick and drive sales from its dormant customers, Macy’s was simply looking to create some engagement to bring customers out of hibernation. And it largely accomplished that: the campaign, which was executed over a period of six weeks, produced a 6% increase in active email subscribers, a 9% increase in open rate of unique recipients, and a 14% increase in the CTR of unique recipients. 

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You can’t argue with results, or can you?

Those increases were driven, in part, by Macy’s use of tactics like send time optimization. As Internet Retailer’s Berthene detailed, the company “looked at the average time the consumer opened and clicked on a Macy’s email within the last six months and then sent the consumer an email at that time.”

The retailer also employed shrewd but potentially controversial tactics. In an effort to capture the attention of dormant customers, Macy’s used transactional subject lines like ”Please verify today” and “Confirmation requested”. And it sent follow-up emails if a customer didn’t take action within a short period of time.

Stephanie Lau, Macy’s VP of retention marketing, told attendees at Oracle’s Modern Customer Experience conference in Chicago that “it definitely looks like an ex who wants to talk to you, but it works.”

Obviously, every company needs to decide how aggressive it wants to be in attempting to reactivate dormant customers, and every company’s mileage will vary because their customer bases are unique. But the Macy’s effort is not only a reminder of the value of not forgetting about dormant customers, but also of the value of not being afraid to experiment and, where appropriate, experiment boldly.

Preventing customers from going dormant

Of course, by adopting a customer retention mindset, companies have the potential to reduce the number of customers that they have to reactivate from a deep hibernation and this should be an aspirational goal for just about every company. This is where tech really has the potential to help. 

For example, more and more companies are employing predictive analytics to predict customer churn. By identifying the attributes of customers that are likely to be lost or go into hiding, businesses will have the opportunity to engage them sooner than later, which, for obvious reasons, is likely to be more effective.

While predictive analytics isn’t exactly new, not every company has had the know-how to put it to use. But with a growing number of third party vendors offering predictive analytics tools, it’s becoming more accessible and will likely become a common component in many companies’ customer retention toolkits.

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Econsultancy also offers email marketing training.