Get started with your lost customers

Do you only have customers who buy, or do you sometimes leave the back door open? Every business has to deal with customers who, over time, start buying elsewhere. Sometimes this is just a natural part of business, but it’s also possible that you lose track of customers because interesting new customers or those who are actively buying demand your attention. If you’re not careful, all the revenue you’ve just earned will simply slip out the back door. The question is: How do you prevent them from becoming lost customers? And how do you win them back?

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Identifying Lost Customers

To start, you’ll need a printout of your customer database, including sales figures from the past few years. You’ll also need to define when a customer is considered “lost.” If your organization relies on recurring customer orders, you can use the rule of thumb that a customer is considered lost one year after their last order. It’s important that you determine for yourself the specific time period—after the last order received from a customer—at which they are classified as a lost customer.

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Click the link to download the "Leaky Bathtub" model, an Excel file that automatically filters your lost customers.

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Bathtub_model_TMC Media

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Who are the interesting lost customers?

It sounds strange, but some customers aren’t a good fit for your company—and yet they’ve still made purchases from you. Sometimes it’s better for them to shop elsewhere because they take up too much of your inside sales team’s time. However, there are also customers you lose track of who are actually a good fit for your company. Unfortunately, there’s no handy or clever trick to quickly identify these companies. You’ll need to go over this list with your sales team and use it as a basis to work on winning them back.

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How can you prevent losing track of customers?

It starts with communicating regularly with your customers—through LinkedIn messages, newsletters, and phone calls. If you don’t keep them in mind, there’s a chance they won’t keep you in mind either. You can use certain tools that alert you when a customer is about to become a lost customer.

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Tools that can help with this include a CRM, ERP, or possibly BI. For example, you could set up a rule based on the last order date: a notification will be triggered when it exceeds 12 months. After that, it’s up to the sales team to assess whether it’s worth reaching out to this customer.

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Use Leadinfo to win back lost customers

Leadinfo is a tool that allows you to identify companies on your website. For example, if you send an email containing a link to an offer on the website and the customer clicks on it, Leadinfo will identify them. Once they’ve been identified, you can call them. This makes calling a contact person feel a lot less like a cold call.

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If you already use Leadinfo, you could use the list of lost customers to see if they visited the website during a specific period and what they viewed at that time. You should also tag them as “lost customers” and use the trigger function to receive a notification when a lost customer visits your website. This way, you can follow up with them at the right time.

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Need help winning back your lost customers? Or interested in a free Leadinfo demo? Please contact me at casper.lucassen@tmcmedia.nl or via the contact button.

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