Many of us have signed up for free software trials and not upgraded to the paid version when the trial period ended.
Some of us might have bought a subscription for the paid version, used it for a few months, and then bailed out.
In all these cases, we become the SaaS vendor’s “lost customers”.
According to common marketing wisdom, it’s 10X more costly to acquire new customers than sell to existing ones.
While selling to lost customers may not as easy, this segment is still a low hanging fruit for most vendors.
Ergo, it’s worth exploring ways to winning them back. This is what I’ll do in this post. (Avoiding the loss of an existing customer in the first place is another topic that we’ve covered in an earlier post titled Best Practices For Reducing SaaS Churn).
Some vendors have already started taking rudimentary steps in this direction.
Take Otixo for example.
The company sent me an email recently, announcing a freemium plan, outlining new features and entreating me to “Come back to Otixo”.
When I received this message, I couldn’t place the company. When I wracked my head and finally recalled what it did, I couldn’t remember when or why I’d signed up for Otixo. Not surprisingly, I ignored this email.
Otixo failed to convert a lost customer.
This experience got me wondering if Otixo could have done anything better in order to revive their lost customers.
I could readily think of at least five things that Otixo and other SaaS companies could do better:
- Reintroduce itself with an elevator pitch. Not having used Otixo for over a year, I completely forgot what it does. Pity is, it does something great: It copies files directly from one cloud location to another. In other words, it obviates the need to download files from the first location (“source”) to the local PC and then upload them from the PC to the second location (“destination”). In this manner, it saves time and bandwidth.
- Tell the customer when they signed up for the service. The vendor should be able to find this data easily from its registration database. In my case, it was sometime in 2013. A date or at least the month of initial signup would help provide the customer with the background.
- Give a glimpse of the purchase journey viz. (a) How did the customer find the software? (b) Why did they sign up? (c) What path did they take to make the purchase? I don’t remember any of these things regarding Otixo. SkyGlue, Convertro and other visitor tracking technologies can help software companies answer these questions.
- Jog the user’s memory with the first action they took upon becoming a customer. Logs could provide this information. I think I’d copied a few files from a website to an FTP zone but I’m not sure.
- Finally, entice the user back with an attractive offer, as Otixo did with its freemium plan. (I still didn’t convert because Otixo failed to provide the information in #1 through #4, without which I lacked context.)
While there could be many other ways to bring lost customers back on board, the above list should serve as a good starting point.
Happy Reviving!