NOTE: Today we’re going to continue looking at the 11th Marketing Fundamental You Need to Succeed in 2022: the need to continually reengage your lost or former customers.
If you really want to win back past customers, you have to begin by asking the right questions.
That way you can get to the root of the problem behind why they stopped doing business with your company. I guess you could call it “the straw that broke your customer’s back.”
If you stick with me, I’ll help you discover two things:
- The actual, mathematical measurement of the straw that broke the camel’s back. Why not? 🙂
- A way to discover what caused your customer to stop purchasing from you so you can win them back.
If that sounds good to you, let’s get started…
The Popular Idiom
“The straw that broke the camel’s back.”
I’m sure you’ve heard this phrase before.
It’s used to describe a small or even routine action that suddenly leads to a surprising, negative result.
You might not believe this. But I discovered in an issue of New York Magazine, back in 1978, that a guy named Randy Cohen decided to find out the REAL ANSWER to the question, “How much can a camel actually carry?”
I thought it’d be fun to quickly look at his answer before we look at the root problem you need to uncover to re-engage your former customers.
The Real Straw That Broke the Camel’s Back
Here’s the excerpt from Cohen…
“At what point did the straw break the camel’s back?
– Randy Cohen in New York Magazine, 1978
“In his Treatise on One-Humped Camels in Health and in Disease, A. S. Leese reports that camels can generally carry from 240 up to 1200 pounds–which only ‘the very best animals’ can manage. The record for camel capacity in Australia is 1904 pounds.”
According to Cohen, it sounds like 1200+ pounds is the official, mathematical answer for the actual amount that equals “the straw that broke the camel’s back.”
Now that that’s out of the way, let’s get back to the answer that you really care about.
What’s the straw that broke your customer’s back?
What caused your customer to stop purchasing from you?
5 Important Questions to Answer to Successfully Win Back Past Customers
In order to calculate that answer to what caused them to stop purchasing, you need to ask 5 key questions:
1. When did they stopped purchasing?
If you don’t know the answer to this question, then you can’t begin to trace back what caused them to stop purchasing from you in the first place.
You need to know when this problem began.
2. Why did they stopped purchasing?
Can you discover this from the data that your company collects? Can you find the answer in any contact with your customer service?
If not, you might need to directly ask your question this question.
(*Don’t worry. I’ll show you a way to do that in the next article I have planned for you.)
3. What did they purchase from you in the past and especially what did they purchase from you last?
How long have they been your customer and what is their purchase history?
This information is important to know so that you can determine what made them stop purchasing. It can also be helpful to determine what incentive can get them to come back.
4. How often did they purchased from you in the past?
Were they a frequent or regular customer? Or were they more like an infrequent and random customer?
This is important to know so you know how valuable they were to your company and how much time, effort, and money you should invest to get them back.
You wouldn’t want to spend a lot of time and effort on a customer who didn’t purchase much from you in the first place.
5. Who are they? Demographics, psychographics, etc.
If you’ve determined that they were valuable to company and are important for you to win back, you’re going need to know who they are, what they care about, and what they value.
When you come up with the answers to these 5 questions, you’ll know (or be much closer to knowing) what the straw was that broke their back.
And armed with that information, you’ll be able to focus on winning them back.
In my next article, I’m going to give you a template you can use to directly ask them why they stopped buying from you (question #2 above).
But the source of this template might surprise you.
My next article will be called…
How to Use This 100-Year-Old B2B Re-Engagement Letter (with a 35% Response Rate) for Your Next Winback Email.
The First Two Articles on the 11th Marketing Fundamental
You can read the first two articles focused on the 11th marketing fundamental you need to succeed in 2022:
- The 11th Marketing Fundamental You Need to Succeed in 2022
- 6 Reasons Why Your Customers Might Leave Your Business
Catch Up on What You Missed in This Series
Stay tuned. Subscribe below to be automatically be notified when the next article goes live.
If you would like to learn more about any of the above fundamentals, then click here to choose any articles you’d like to read. (There are now 57 articles you can read in this series.)
Get Emailed Whenever a New Article Goes Live
Did you enjoy this article? Then don’t miss when the next one goes live.
Sign-up below and you will be emailed whenever a new article is posted.
(That means that you will usually be emailed multiple times a week.)
