Three strategies to re-engage one-time buyers

Reengaging one-time buyers is one of the most cost-effective marketing objectives you can pursue. These customers have trusted you to deliver what you claimed you would and (hopefully) now have a relationship with your brand.

You have already purchased these customers through actual or word-of-mouth advertising and have successfully converted them. They are all the way through the sales funnel, and now you can drop them into your re-engagement funnel to encourage yet another sale (or two).

There are many programs you can leverage to re-engage one-time buyers, and the right strategy for your company depends on your business goals, target demographic and other important details.

Three re-engagement programs that almost every business can leverage follow. These are your basic re-engagement strategies to drive repeat customers in your store or business.

1. Re-engagement emails

2. Rewards Program

3. Page + Product retargeting

Re-engagement emails

Re-engagement emails are one of the first re-engagement strategies you should implement for your brand because they are often inexpensive, automatically triggered tactics that, once set up, will continue to run and send money your way.

Good topics for re-engagement emails are genuine reasons to contact your customer. You won’t want to create arbitrary engagements as it may cause the customer to cut ties to the relationship. This fear, though, shouldn’t stop you from sending these reengagements.

Just put yourself in your customer's shoes and ask, "What would I like to hear from my brand.” Ideas of topics you can leverage for engaging reengagement include the following

• Happy Birthday: Everyone loves presents! Try including a $5 or $10 off when you spend X discount! Your one-time purchasers may be tempted to make another purchase and will definitely feel warm fuzzies toward your brand. (Improving your relationship and putting you top of mind for your customer) Obviously this requires some work ahead of time getting birthday information.

• One-Year Customer Anniversary: This tactic is a genuine way to celebrate your past customers and give them warm fuzzies. It’s good to include products your past purchaser would find relevant or interesting if you can.

• VIP first-release sales announcement: Releasing your sale to your purchasers first gives them a feeling of being special and tells them you value their business. Make sure to include language around the fact that they are getting the early sale release to make sure inventory is strong.

• Referral Requests: Offering a “discount for you and one for your referral” is a great way to get customers to share your brand with their friends. This email serves two purposes, encourage a repeat purchase and use word-of-mouth advertising (the most successful type) to convert new customers.

• Review Request: This tactic is absolutely a must-have because it is both a genuine reason to reengage one-time buyers and also to support your business by gathering reviews (which improve SEO, customer time on page and customer support).

Rewards + Referral Programs

Rewards programs are the second-mentioned program here, because because they will more than likely require you to bring on another app or program outside of your store, however, rewards and referral programs can increase your repeat customer rate by more than 20%.

Giving customers rewards like points or cash back can gamify shopping with your brand and incentivize sales and repeat sales. How many times have you shopped with a brand simply because you had or wanted to earn points? Why leave all that shopping inspiration on the table for your competitors?

I have worked with two really great programs from Shopify and you can’t go wrong with either.

​App	GrowWave	Yotpo
Pros	​Easy to set up, great customer support, comparatively inexpensive option, easy to use platform, reward customers for most actions they take,	Great customer support, easy-to-use platform and programming means beautiful + dynamic output, integrates with many others, can create custom reward actions
Cons	Doesn’t integrate as well with other apps	More expensive

There are definitely other programs you can choose: Loyalty Lion has been a front-runner when vetting these programs as well.

Page and Product Retargetting

This programming is a great way to get your products back in front of your one-time customers. There are many ways you can get your product and pages back in front of your customers and Google and Meta make accomplishing this tactic easier.

1. Google advertising: In Google it is relatively easy to set up retargetting campaigns that reengage customers with either an ad you create or your connected product catalog (feed).

2. Social Media Advertising: On Meta (Facebook parent company), businesses can set up either ads that speak specifically to the one-time buyer and are targeted to them as well. This can include promoting a product they will be interested as well as why they would like it, a product ad with your connected product catalog (you can choose specific products or collections to promote), or a page or landing page you have created with information that will interest or inspire your target customer.

These communications pieces will be your new best friends and have you looking for more ways to reengage your one-time buyers to make them Lifetime Customers.

As always, if this makes your head spin, hit me up! I would love to help you set these up or understand more about them!