The Re-Welcome journey

Marketeers are all too familiar with the importance of an engaging customer centric ‘Welcome’ journey, in fact we talked about it here a few weeks back.  

When customers interact with your brand and make a purchase, they expect to hear from you. They want to be informed, inspired and often to feel the excitement of their most recent purchase – whether that’s a tangible product or experience.

Following that initial ‘welcome’ and customer contact data, the next engagement with your brand may well be tactical or seasonal campaigns – often not related to their previous purchase with you. Post welcome customers all too often fall into the blackhole bucket of ‘in-life’ comms, or worse still, if there is no engagement; ‘retention or win back’.

I’ll let you into a little secret, not many companies really consider the role of ‘Re-Welcome’ in their customer journey plans, so giving this small window of time with your customer some attention, could well give you the competitive advantage.  

Most relevant for companies offering services or non-tangible products like experiences. Whether it be a holiday, a day-out or a dining experience, getting your customer to relive their experience with your brand soon after they’ve experienced it could be your ticket to reengagement.

Firstly – simply acknowledge their value to your brand

For these customers, your first communication objective is simply to acknowledge their recent experience with you, possibly welcoming them home from their holiday, thanking them for dining with you last weekend or visiting your attraction. Either way – this initial communication shouldn’t feel like a hard sell, neither should it simply be soliciting feedback for aTrustPilot review or your internal NPS metrics.

Bonus tip here is ensuring your MarTech capability allows for a data-driven communication – using personalised, relevant and hyper-targeted content to acknowledge their custom and land a message that feels heart-warming, unique and personal.

Equally, if there are indications that the customer didn’t have a good experience with you, for example calls into your contact centre, poor reviews or complaints – then de-duping the customer from this journey from the offset is critical rather than causing further irritation.

Assuming their experience with you was amazing…

Post this initial acknowledgement of their customer, if your brand has social media pages, an app or a newsletter subscription  then this is an ideal time to then encourage follows, downloads and sharing . The customers brand love for you should be at an all-time high and its likely they’ve already been sharing their experience organically with friends and family. Capitalise on this by encouraging social media tagging on their content, or communicating any referral / recommend-a friend propositions you may have.

Their consent becomes even more valuable

As with all stages of lifecycle journeys, the ‘Re-Welcome is also a good time to capture any extended consent preferences (e.g. if you only have email, you could ask for address or mobile number) – this allows for richer population of your single customer view. To drive more brand affinity and create a value exchange, now is a good time to land a competition or prize draw to capitalise on their good memories and encourage your customer to visualise their next experience with your brand.

‍This is where the theory behind a journey comes in…

In theory you’ve created some brand warmth via a couple of non-salesly communications, you’ve created a feel-good value exchange by offering up an incentive for more of their data consent, so now is a good time to follow-up with a soft encouragement to revisit your website. Showing them content that highlights relevant offers or similar experiences that they may not yet have considered shouldn’t feel like a hard sell – and with the clever use of data capability and tools like intent models – you could get the content just right for that next conversion.

Leave the discounting until the end…

Lastly – and only at the end of this journey and if the customer is still yet to reengage, now is the opportunity to A/B test some price discounting to really drive that final purchase before the customer drops into the ‘in-life’ bucket and becomes one of many customers in this segment.‍

In summary

Building a campaign ‘journey’ rather than a one off communication can really drive a deeper relationship with your customer – not all communications need to be hard-hitting sales, and customers will appreciate just a simple token of recognition for their initial loyalty to your brand. This in turn can lead to longer term brand advocacy and consideration.

How long this Re-Welcome journey is, and the frequency behind each piece of communication will vary depending on what your typical sales consideration window is. As with all customer journeys, we recommend testing content, frequency and audience segmentation.

At Loop, we have extensive experience of developing data-driven lifecycle journeys. We recently supported one of our Travel clients to develop a strategic ‘Re-Welcome Home’ journey which has proven to be highly effective in the first 2 months of launch.

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