Converting one-time buyers into repeat customers.

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No matter the number of records, the average retail database will be made up largely of people that either have yet to buy or who bought once but not since. 

Repeat customers are always represented the least, but are the most valuable. 

So, when it comes to boosting incremental revenue, finding a way to shift the balance by inspiring more customers to buy, and buy again is the critical question. 

Throw-in the fact that acquisition costs more than retention and suddenly the most obvious point of value is turning one timer buyers into repeat customers.

But how?

The key is understanding that your customer’s behaviour over time is critical. To be honest, knowing what they purchased last time is almost irrelevant. Instead, we’ve found that looking at how they engage with a brand; across which channels; their missions and point on their journey; the types of touchpoints each prefers and the messaging they respond to, or not, helps to shape how you can inspire repeat purchases.

Recently, we’ve worked on two one-time buyer campaigns using this approach. 

The first was for a global fragrance and the objective was simple – increase second time purchases by 10 per cent. 

We designed personalised content that reflected individual customer behaviour and delivered it in close-to real time – previous experimentation told us that someone’s interaction with the brand in the last months was key to our communication’s effectiveness. 

We added layers of richness to our engagement data with individual, historical transactional, propensity data and in the moment intent data to help decide the content that each person received. 

Even more compelling - the content served was dependent on when the recipient opened the email. So, if our message sat unopened in an inbox for a few days it might contain a different message than when it was originally sent based on the behaviour of the recipient in those intervening days. 

We achieved a 32 per cent uplift in second purchase - 22 per cent above the original target. The approach has now been successfully scaled and we believe stands testament to the power of relevant, behaviour-based, in the moment customer experiences.

Our second recent success was for a global fast service food restaurant. The objective was similar in many ways to our first – to re-activate valuable lapsed app-ordering guests.

Again, we harnessed the power of individual behaviour. 

The current retention CX using the time-honoured coupon was failing to deliver. Our analysis revealed the reason why - Coupon redemption didn’t drive volume OR valuable behaviour – recognising and servicing individual missions in the moment did.

Our mission was to give our lapsed app-ordering guests a reason to use the app again based on the things they did every day. So we segmented the audience into cohorts based on the way they used both coupons and the app - using this insight to mobilise each of these groups. 

We designed activity around missions that we knew would inspire our lapsed customers to buy; for instance breakfast on the go, or conversely to enjoy a lazy weekend breakfast delivery.

And our hypothesis was proven. In defining and promoting the missions within just four weeks we delivered a 136 per cent reactivation uplift of lapsed app customers, resulting in an increase of 19,000 orders.

What is clear from these two campaigns is that when it comes to driving repeat custom transactional data is not a differentiator – behaviour is.

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