Spend, Experiment, Save

It's time to think about actually implementing reactivation tactics.

You have three choices, in my opinion.

1. Spend.
2. Experiment.
3. Save.

In SPEND mode, you gladly transfer the profit your best customers generate to Google/Facebook, because the customer has a reasonable chance of buying again. It's old-school e-commerce digital marketing on display. Personalization opportunities matter here.

In EXPERIMENT mode, you are not willing to spend a lot of money. You are willing to leverage your free and mostly free channels to experiment. You try different tactics to encourage the customer to buy something. I'm doing it right now with many of you. Many of you are lapsed MineThatData buyers, and I am experimenting with a free channel to see if a new product might resonate with you. I'd typically have a booklet for you by this point, and the booklet would generate business (not just book sales ... actual products). At this time, I'm experimenting with a different tactic. We'll see if my experiment works. You should be doing the same.

In SAVE mode, you stop wasting money because the customer does not have much of a chance of buying again. This is going to be HARD for you to do. Those of you who developed your chops in the pre-e-commerce world were required to reactivate lapsed buyers ... you were told this was a gold mine, and you were told to spend a lot of money here because these customers had better long-term value than new customers had.

• Those days are long, long gone.
• In SAVE mode, you only spend energy on content ... email marketing, social, community, video.
• In SAVE mode, your job is to get the customer to (and I hate this word) ENGAGE with your content. That's it. It's a multi-step process. If the customer engages with your content, document it in your database (if you can ... and this is important ... if you can, you must document it).

More next week.