In most countries, no sports matches, concerts, festivals, or any other event took place because of Covid-19. Now that the world is slowly recovering, events are being organized again. And fans are getting back into the swing of things.
Many organizations have scaled back their communications to the bare minimum, with no organized events and therefore nothing to communicate about. What a shame! As a CRM marketer, you've worked your a** off over the past few years to build an active base. The radio silence that most organizations have kept is disastrous for the vibrancy of their fans.
Building a fan relationship does not happen by itself; you have to maintain it. Regularly, they need to hear from you. A month without communication is, therefore, out of the question, let alone a year. To prevent your base from shrinking, you need to communicate at least 1.4 times a month. Take the example of the SXSW festival in Austin, Texas; with a frequency of 1.6, they know how to maintain their audience until the moment it will be organized physically again. And who knows, maybe your base will even grow; you want that, right?
Re-engage fans
But fear not, it's never too late to make an effort to win back your fans. By setting up targeted win-back campaigns, you can reawaken dormant users. Win-back, Re-engagement, or Reactivation of your audience is the process of running campaigns targeted at users that were once active. They currently don't open, respond, visit or buy anymore, and to do so, you offer them something for their return.
Win-back in 3 stages
1. Identify your inactive users.
First, you need to analyze the user base thoroughly. In Notificare, the User Activity graph gives you a good idea of your current audience. You can quickly see who among your fans has been active in the past month, between 1 and 3 months, between 3 and 6 months, or longer than 6 months ago.
And, if you want to take it a step further, you can use Audience Selection to see which users were active before Covid-19 and did nothing after that.
Now that you have clear picture of how active your users are, you can get to work and figure out how you are going to do this!
2. Define a win-back strategy.
To win someone back, you need an elaborate strategy. And only you knows what your fans are moved and motivated by. It can cost five times more to attract a new customer than to retain an existing one. So also make sure you have a budget within the organization, let's say 15% or 20% discounts to give away.
A best practice here is the 3-message tactic. You set up a flow of 3 messages, and depending on the opens (or not) and clicks (or not), you set up follow-up messages. Focus your first message on a clear offer; you can send a reminder after 2 or 3 days when the message is not opened. If there is still no response, send your last message a week later.
3. Try a different channel.
Of course, it also happens that your fans no longer care about the channel with which you interacted a year ago. Perhaps they switched to mobile. A Rich User Profile allows a user to have multiple communication channels within Notificare. Notificare keeps track of which channel the user was last active on. And so, in your selection for a win-back email campaign, for example, you can exclude users who were active on mobile.
Prevent this from happening again
The exceptional situation of Covid-19 has caused us to see conditions that we have never experienced before. A win-back campaign can restore the relationship of your fan base, but it will not immediately bring it back to its old level. Therefore you need to prevent radio silence from happening again to your users. Thus set up Automation triggers that run without you having to think about it.
And if your fans no longer respond to all the effort you put into them because you are no longer relevant, then clean up nicely. Previously we wrote in "Keep your users active" how to use the User Life Time to deactivate users automatically based on their last active date.
It's time to win them all back
Do you need help with re-engaging your fans, or do you want to discuss the best win-back strategy for your user base with one of our campaign experts? Then get in touch with our customer success team.