Wake Up Churned
And Idle Customers
Written by Rob Lane.
1. Overview
As much as we love great email at Rare, we also love data. After all, it’s data…and a lot of it…that drives the predictive product recommendations that go into your email.
When we see something that can be of help to you we like to pass it along, and that’s exactly what we’re doing today.
Rare customers already know that we automatically segment customers into active, idle, and churned. For those reading this that are new to Rare, it breaks down like this:
- Active – customers who have purchased from you in the last 180 days.
- Idle – customers who last purchased from you between 180 and 365 days ago.
- Churned – customers who last purchased more than 365 days ago.
We do this to give you a look at the current health of your business, but also to help you unlock opportunities.
2. Some Surprising Data
In reviewing our data on these three segments recently, we noticed something surprising. First, as you would expect, active customers convert much better than either churned or idle customers. But, we were also expecting the idle and churned customers to show lower open rates relative to the rate at which they are sent email. After all, lower conversion rates, inactive customers…lower open rates seems like a logical conclusion.
2. Not So Fast
As you can see by the graphs below, the “opens by status,” especially for churned customers, are very strong. And for idle customers they are right on pace with the rate at which they receive email.
Notice that the ratios of sends and opens are very similar. It’s conversions that drop, as stated earlier.
3. Opportunity Awaits
We were definitely surprised, but also excited to see this. Selfishly, it’s validation that our highly personalized, responsive email is doing it’s job, but what really stands out is the opportunity this data presents for your email marketing strategy.
How so? Well, this shows that idle and churned customers are listening, they just aren’t converting.
So if the message is getting through, a little fine tuning might help bump up those conversion rates. Enter our visual segment builder!
As we discussed in an earlier post, segmentation is a very effective way to identify new customer groups for your mailouts. Whether it’s preferred brands, location, or gender (to name a few) you can create segments of customers with common traits, and then tailor your message to appeal to those traits. The more personal the message, the better the conversion rate.
4. Fine Tune Your Message
So, if we apply this to churned and idle customers, you will no doubt find a number of great marketing opportunities! Your current email already has some appeal based on the data we’ve provided, so imagine how much stronger the message could be if it’s tailored for the city they live in, or their favorite brand. You can easily find this out with our segment builder, and if you like you can immediately start an email campaign with just a few clicks.
5. At The Risk of Repeating Ourselves
As we often say, idle and churned customers are still customers. For further proof we refer you to item number one in this recent post.
Re-ignite their interest in your store by using our visual segment builder to fine tune your email campaigns and connect with them all over again. You’ll be able to see the results of your campaigns and directly attribute conversions (sales!) back to the campaign.
Then the fun begins – you get to nurture these reactivated customers all over again and turn them into loyal customers.
6. Conclusion
If you’re an ecommerce merchant and don’t have automated email marketing campaigns setup for your store, you’re losing money. Right now.
Rare.io makes it easy to start using automated email campaigns for common challenges like: Welcome Series, Abandoned Carts, Order Follow-up emails and more! You can learn more about our powerful email marketing automation features here or go ahead and get started right away by using Rare.io for FREE.
And if you’re one of the thousands of merchants who are already using Rare’s Smart Email Marketing software and want to see how our Customer Success Team can work with your brand to grow your revenue – feel free to book a call at your convenience here.
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