Web push win-back campaigns: Re-engaging inactive customer segments for higher conversions

A win-back campaign, also known as a re-engagement campaign, is a targeted and personalized message sent to customers who are dormant. It’s an attempt to bring them back to your site to make a purchase. Since retaining your existing customers is way easier than acquiring new ones, pursuing win-back campaigns is an essential strategy for every business. In fact, retaining just 5% of your customers can increase your profits anywhere from 25% to 90%. Re-engaging your customers helps you bring them out of inactivity and get them back into your sales pipeline and marketing funnel. This pursuit contributes to your revenue generation pipeline and boosts your profits.

In your win-back campaigns, getting segmentation right is crucial. With the right technology, you can segment your audience list based on how they have interacted with your brand online. Some examples would be their history of purchase and category browsing, subscription behavior, and recent activity, among others.

But, what causes your customers to go silent and become inactive? There might be various reasons. However, one of the prime reasons can be lack of engagement. There are two possible reasons why your customers go inactive:

  1. Your web push notification strategies are not working or are ineffective
  2. Your customers opted-out from your notifications as their preferences changed

While you can have only a limited amount of control over the preferences of your customers, you can entirely control the effectiveness of your web push notification campaigns. Nevertheless, the two reasons are often interlinked. Here are a few reasons why your campaigns may be ineffective.

5 Reasons Why Your Existing Web Push Notification Campaigns Are Ineffective

1. Irrelevant Push Notifications: Customers don’t like businesses that send push notifications with zero relevance. Imagine an eCommerce store sending special offers on polo t-shirts to a customer who has no interest in this style. It’s not a great experience, and it can get quite frustrating.

While your notifications may apply to many customers, there will be specific segments that will have nothing to do with those general messages. 

2. Non-Personalized Notifications: In our digital-first era, customers expect brands to understand them and their preferences. Customers demand personalized experiences right from the beginning, and throughout their relationship with the brands they love. If you keep sending generic push notifications and ignore the personalization aspect of your messages, then customers are bound to neglect the messages from your brand. And worse, they’ll switch to your competitors. 

3. Repetitive Notifications: Receiving repetitive content over a period of time can quickly turn into a negative experience. You might have already seen how customers can get deeply frustrated to the point where they express their feelings on your social media platforms. Sending these types of messages makes your customers opt-out of notifications and makes them inactive.

4. Frequent Notifications: Push notification fatigue (or blindness) is a real problem. While web push notifications are an effective and powerful way to engage your customers, the attention-grabbing nature of this outreach can make it feel quite intrusive and overwhelm your users when used frequently. You should be careful not to inundate your customers with notifications and increase your churn rate.

5. Uninspiring Notification Titles: One of the major reasons for the increase in your inactive customer base is poor customer engagement. If your notifications are not interesting, your customers won’t be willing to engage with them. The #1 method of making your push notifications intriguing is to use captivating titles that speak to the interests of your users. Weak or generic-sounding notification titles lower your engagement and increase customer dormancy. 

We’ve explored the top reasons why your users go dormant. Win-back push notifications designed with a clear and actionable copy and design, will not only help you see who’s still interested in your brand but may also generate immediate conversions. 

However, it is not wise to target your entire customer base with a single win-back push notification campaign. You need to identify the segments that have gone inactive to better grab their attention using the right type of notification by addressing their specific interests. Here are the customer segments that you need to consider for successful win-back campaigns.

Top 5 Audience Segments to Re-Engage With Push Notification Win-Back Campaigns

1. New Customers Segment: First-time visitors on your website are least likely to make a purchase but they are valuable to your business. These are the subscribers who have created an account on your website and did not yet make a purchase. This means that they are already interested in your brand but haven’t found the right product, value, or the wow factor to make their first purchase. 

You can send your new customers a discount or a coupon code in order to encourage them to make their first purchase. 


2. Non-Frequent Customers Segment:
 As a conversion-focused marketer, your goal is to sell high-value products and increase the Average Order Value (AOV). This is where engaging the non-frequent customers and winning them back will help you increase revenue. These are the customers who don’t purchase frequently, but they are still of high value to the business.

In order to nudge them to make a repeat purchase, you can leverage reminder push notifications. For example, you can send your non-frequent audience segment a predictive stock replenishment notification and turn them from one-time customers to frequent customers.

3. Inactive/Dormant Customers Segment: Getting your existing customers to make repeat purchases is not an easy task but it is easier than acquiring new ones and converting them. It is crucial to target dormant customers and prompt them to make new purchases. 

Customers in this segment have not made a new purchase for a specific time frame (in the last “x” days), since their last purchase. Initiate these customers by sending them a web push notification to make a purchase, and include exciting offers.


4.Predictive Customer Segment:
 As marketers, you are used to collecting high volumes of data for one reason—to understand customer behaviours and translate it into intelligent customer interactions in real time. By using AI-backed predictive segments such as “Likelihood to Churn” and “Likelihood to Purchase” you can easily decide which customers should receive win-back push notification campaigns.

Winning back this segment is important because the specific intent of the customer is backed by insights from your customer data. Not reaching out to these customers would make you lose a significant amount of revenue. 

5. Unconverted Customers Segment: Every business has a significant number of customers who have not yet made a purchase. They’re the ones who visit your website at least once a month but do not take an action that turns into a conversion. This customer segment is already interested in your brand but hasn’t found the right product to purchase.

Winning back this segment is critical to increase your conversion rates. A well-crafted win-back push notification campaign will help you win them back in no time.

The customers of this segment are looking for a hook to make the first purchase from your website. You can offer them free shipping and give them the encouragement they need to make a purchase from your business.

Effective win-back campaigns for web push notifications should be an integral part of your engagement strategy, as win-back campaigns matter greatly in the long run. Also, if you have an increasing customer base, dormant customers can potentially make up a large part of your users. Winning back even a small amount of these inactive or churned users can bring a significant amount of revenue. 

The essential way of regaining your inactive customers is to show them that you care! You can easily engage your customers with a series of personalized and well thought out push notifications and build loyalty. 

To find out how web push notifications can help your business grow, reach out to get a personalized demo.

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Chris Baldwin - VP Marketing, Brand and Communications

Chris is an award-winning marketing leader with more than 12 years experience in the marketing and customer experience space. As VP of Marketing, Brand and Communications, Chris is responsible for Insider's brand strategy, and overseeing the global marketing team. Fun fact: Chris recently attended a clay-making workshop to make his own coffee cup…let's just say that he shouldn't give up the day job just yet.

Read more from Chris Baldwin

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