Past customers spend more and buy bigger-ticket items than first-time shoppers. According to consultancy Bain & Company, the average repeat customer for an apparel business spent 67% more in months 31-36 of their relationship with the company than in the first six months. This weekend is one of the biggest shopping weekends of the year and it’s time to give those past customers another reason to buy again. While email marketing is a great way to launch a Memorial Day retention campaign, social media, and digital advertising can also be used to bring back past customers. Here are a few steps you can take to create a Memorial Day campaign that will re-engage past customers on this busy shopping weekend.
The hardest part about getting new customers is figuring out what they want from you. With your existing customers, though, that’s not a problem: they’ve already told you what they like. You know what products they’ve bought, as well as what offers made them buy, like free shipping or a 10% off discount.
Digging through your sales data can help you figure out what products and promotions will generate the most sales. Memorial Day is a big shopping holiday, so you’ll want to have your best offers and most popular products ready to go.
After you’ve reviewed your data for products and promotions, use it to segment customers by what made them respond and buy from you. For example, if some visitors were drawn in with free shipping, while others were more interested in a limited edition shirt, you can serve up different messaging to those customers.
Segmenting your audiences lets you match up your most powerful offers with the customers most likely to respond to them. In fact, 71% of customers prefer ads with messaging tailored to them. This kind of hyper-personalized approach is a win-win for everyone: your customers get the deals that mean the most to them, and you get more customers.
If it hasn’t been too long since your past customer’s last visit, use retargeting to re-engage them. Leverage analytics to predict what they’d be interested in, and create ads that showcase similar products that will pop up in their social media feeds and the websites they visit. This is where your customer data and segmentation will be especially useful, as you can tailor the type of ads to appear in front of—and appeal—to your past customers.
Yes, your past customers will get a lot of emails this weekend. But you can optimize your email marketing to give you the best results. First, segment your email list. Two ways to segment your lists effectively for past customers is by how long it’s been since someone bought from you - recency - or by how often someone bought from you - frequency. Both allow you to craft more memorable, personalized, and engaging emails.
For example, someone that bought from you a long time ago or just buys from you every so often might not be ready for a direct sales message. Instead, invite them to remember our heroes or ring in the summer season with you to get back on their radar. More frequent or recent customers, on the other hand, might be more receptive to a more traditional promotion.
While Memorial Day is a great opportunity to bring in new customers, don’t forget about your past customers. They’re more likely to buy from you and generate more revenue. Use the weekend to launch a marketing campaign that re-engages these latent customers on a weekend they’re already primed to open their wallets and watch the revenue roll in.
Last updated on September 20th, 2023.