Lifecycle Stages for Growth Marketers Part 3 – Win-Backs

Last updated: January 11, 2023

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Read Part 1 and Part 2 of our series “Lifecycle Stages for the Growth Marketer”.

Customer lifecycle is a term used to describe the progress of a customer as they go through consideration, engagement, purchasing, and maintaining loyalty to a product or service. It starts from the first time you get a user’s attention to your product and then keeping them as loyal customer. The customer lifecycle is often depicted a a circular cycle because the goal of customer retention is to get them to move through the cycle again and again.

A growth marketer’s prime objective is to drive user engagement with the product. The key to driving engagement is understanding the customer’s lifecycle stage and messaging them accordingly over time to keep them as an active customer. Unfortunately, customers churn. Churn is a natural part of the process, however, as a growth marketer, you are responsible for bringing users and customers back.

ENTER THE WIN-BACK CAMPAIGN

Win-back campaigns are about re-activating churned customers or those who are at risk of churning. It is the typical customer lifecycle to become inactive due to the product losing its charm or relevance for the user. These tend to be the hardest to gain back but that’s the challenge growth marketers have signed up for. Growth marketers can deploy different strategies and campaigns to win-back churned customers and their effectiveness depends on how personal and creative you can be.

Traditional win-back marketing campaigns like “We miss you” and “Psst! Come back for 25% Off Your Entire Order” lack any kind of real-time data and insight into the customer. In addition, they actually don;t do much for the long term retention of a customer. Growth marketers have the ability to get more creative by providing actual value to users to get them to come back. (Don’t get us wrong, a discount/promotion code has a time and a place, but that strategy is often for short term gains.)

What is helpful about churned customers is that they are known users who have interacted with the product before in some form. This gives growth marketers large amount of data to use regarding the customer preferences to personalize all messages they send their way. This is an opportunity for growth marketers to think creatively on how to get a customer’s attention again.

AN EXAMPLE OF A SMART WIN-BACK CAMPAIGN

Here is a great example of Pinterest using known user attributes to suggest relevant people and topics to its churned customers to bring them back into the engagement lifecycle.