Cost Effective Win-back Campaigns

Leveraging retail holiday promotions to service customer win-backs 

Big moments in retail create a great opportunity for marketers to plug and play holiday promotions into customer win-back campaigns, serving as a temporary replacement for your original discounts. This is an especially smart tactic if your holiday sales are steeper than your win-back offers. 

How it works:

  • Temporarily eliminates win-back discounts from rewards flow during sale period 
  • Pauses investment needed to support these additional win-back rewards during peak retail competition 
  • Maximizes the promotional reach of holiday sale 

Big retail sales are also a great time to launch customer win-backs if you haven’t already. 

Win-back campaigns are one of the most valuable tools retailers have to combat customer loss. They also can be one of the largest investments into discounts across a retailer’s entire rewards library. 

Key Principles of Successful Activations: 

  1. Investing into larger discount offers for customer win-backs is key in optimizing the success of these campaigns. 
  2. The most effective strategies include a system of rewards that increase in value the more distant a customer becomes.

With AIQ Analytics, users are able to clearly see the varying levels of shopper engagement through our Lifecycle Distribution Chart. This separates customers into four segments based on each individual shoppers buying patterns. 

AIQ’s Customer Lifecycle SegmentsThe Foundation of Win-back Campaigns

Two purchase timeline

  1. Chilling – the customer is 1.25x out of their original two purchase timeline*
  2. Absent – the customer is 1.5x out of their original two purchase timeline
  3. Highly Absent the customer is 1.75x out of their original two purchase timeline
  4. Gone – the customer is 2x out of their original two purchase timeline

*Two purchase timeline is the period of time between the customer’s first and second purchase. 

Retailers can leverage these segments to directly target at-risk customers with automated win-back offers via AIQ Campaigns.

Marketers who lack this level of insight traditionally structure win-back campaigns on set time-frames, using a 30-60-90 day model for customer segmentation. 

How this works: 

Anytime a customer hasn’t returned to shop within these time frames, they’re eligible to receive steep win-back rewards. This means that regardless of purchasing habits, a customer who regularly shops every ~30 days could receive a win-back offer after one month of zero visits. 

The Challenges:

  • Cost-ineffective for retailers
  • Deploys extra or unnecessary campaigns
  • Offers expensive rewards to unintended customers
  • Requires more purchases to be discounted than necessary 

This is why it’s imperative that retailers base their win-back strategies on customer’s individual purchasing patterns as opposed to pre-set attribution windows applied as a blanket to all customers. 

By leveraging AIQ’s highly intelligent and individualized timing metrics, retailers are able to produce considerable results from their win-back campaigns:

  • 24k customers served win-back campaigns
    ➡️ 21% conversion rate = $310k in recaptured revenue
  • 16k customers served win-back campaigns
    ➡️ 19% conversion rate= $164k in recaptured revenue
  • 2.3k customers served win-back campaigns
    ➡️ 20% conversion rate = $69k in recaptured revenue

Remember, the key to a successful win-back campaign is to give past customers a compelling reason to return to your store. 

With AIQ, retailers have the power to deploy highly targeted campaigns that are perfectly timed to your customer’s individual purchasing cycle. By eliminating over-spend, users can reallocate campaign spend to use for stronger, more compelling offers or incentives.