4 Steps to Re-Engage Your Customers and Boost Retention

Identifying when a user begins to disengage is a critical step to retention. These signals can look different based on your brand and business model but often follow similar patterns. For example, signals of disengagement may include a decline in usage, a decrease in open and click-through rates for emails, a lack of engagement on social media, frequency of purchases, and more. Your role as a marketer is to pinpoint these behaviors and trends early so you can re-engage and win them back. Monitor the online and offline behaviors and indicators of your customers, and react to signals such as specific user behaviors, user state changes, events, and transactional status changes. Observing and listening to user behavior helps to understand a customer’s interests and how they’re likely to engage — maybe they’re seeking an attractive deal, or perhaps they are not ready to purchase but are seeking educational content.

Using predictive analytics helps to identify these behaviors early. Utilizing Blueshift’s customer engagement platform harnesses the power of AI to help you predict which customers are likely to churn based on their behaviors with Predictive Scores. This is done by applying and automating best-of-breed AI models to identify the most likely users to reach your identified goals, all without any coding or scripting. In the use case of disengagement or churn, predictive scores easily identify which users are most likely to perform a specific action. At this step, it’s important to not only identify those signals, but to also define goals. Establish a benchmark and identify a target goal to measure against later. 

Once you have identified signs of disengagement, it’s time to act on those signals and valuable customer insights. This means segmenting users based on the behavior and signals you’ve identified. Here you can also leverage predictive scores to create precise segments. Predictive Scores are available on the customer profile and can easily be used for advanced segmentation and syndication, in addition to any other user attribute, activity, or real-time behavior. Tap into your rich data to get even more granular with your segments, for example you may want to target users who engaged with a particular category affinity but haven’t engaged in 30 days or users who haven’t engaged in 2 weeks and have low-intent. 

At this step it’s also important to determine which “events” are associated with the group of users you are targeting in order to automate your messages. Using events you can trigger your messages to send at the right moments in a user’s journey – this could be based on behaviors such as abandoned browse, page view, search, log in or any other custom event for your goal. Creating the right segment is key to reaching the right audience with your campaigns

With a better understanding of your customers and a well-defined target audience, you are now ready to build a strategy that is specifically tailored to meet their unique needs. Crafting a hyper-personalized user experience is a must; otherwise, your efforts to increase engagement will fall short. Now is your chance to make a powerful impression, so get creative and personal to remind customers why they love your brand and why they should return. It’s essential to map out a comprehensive user journey and experience that takes into account each customer’s individual interests, behaviors and level of engagement, as well as evaluate the most suitable channels for your strategies.

As you build an ideal user experience, advanced tools such as automation and AI can help you scale your personalized engagement. Whether you’re utilizing SMS, paid media, or direct mail, it’s critical that you create experiences to reach customers where they are in today’s busy world. Blueshift’s intelligent customer engagement platform helps you personalize every touchpoint and create dynamic experiences that adapt in real-time to changing interests and behaviors. Personalized recommendations help to match each user with the most relevant content or offers. With over 100 pre-built recipes, you can choose predictive content based on previous transactions, promotional content based on previous activity, or create your own. Personalization goes a long way in increasing engagement. In fact, our recent benchmark report found that campaigns using highly personalized AI content and product recommendations resulted in a 166% increase in conversion rate. To get the best results, take the time to nail down the right message, channel, and timing for your audience.

To determine the success of your re-engagement efforts, measure the number of users re-engaged and evaluate the performance against the benchmark and objective you established. Continuously monitor and analyze customer behavior to identify new opportunities and adjust your re-engagement strategy accordingly. Based on your insights, improve your results by continuing to iterate and optimize your strategies. When structuring your campaigns, don’t forget to enlist the help of AI. Use engage time optimization to ensure messages are sent when each customer is most likely to engage with your brand. Use predictive channel engagement scores, based on real-time customer behavior, to engage users on the marketing channel that will drive the most impact. Run A/B tests with automatic winner selection to improve the effectiveness of your outreach. 

As you discover what works for re-engaging your customers, incorporate these insights and learnings into your broader marketing strategy. Ultimately, the objective is to avoid disengagement, so be sure to utilize the knowledge acquired to keep customers fully engaged from the start.

Successful brands retain customers with the Blueshift intelligent customer engagement platform by listening, predicting, and taking action quickly to prevent disinterest and churn. Ultimately, this inspires continued active engagement and grows lifetime value.  

Slickdeals 

Slickdeals is powered by a community of 12 million shoppers who love to find, post, share, vote, and comment on deals. When Slickdeals began to notice that its core power users’ activity level began to dissipate, its marketing team honed in on creating a re-engagement strategy aimed at these specific users. By utilizing their rich customer data, the team was able to build a unique program to identify and reward its most active members. The team relied on predictive scores to measure engagement levels and the signals to segment these users. They were also able to create lookalike models so that they could identify new users with similar traits, continuing to grow their community of power users. By focusing on engaging and retaining users, the team was able to boost revenue from its base of loyal users by 75%. 

View the full customer success story →

To keep users coming back, marketers should lead with authenticity and empathy, and re-engage audiences by using the power of AI marketing to listen, predict, take action, and measure campaigns to rekindle lost or waning customer engagement. With an intelligent customer engagement platform, you can go from losing active customers to proactively retaining customers, growing customer loyalty, and maximizing marketing ROI.

Want to learn more? Check out our curated re-engagement and cross-channel resources.