How to reactivate dormant customers

Dormant is relative to the customer’s own pattern: a customer who ordered monthly and has not for three months is dormant; one who ordered yearly is not until eighteen months have passed. Set the threshold per pattern — two to three times their usual interval — rather than one date for everyone. Then segment by value: the top group, whose peak annual value was significant, get a personal call from the account owner or the owner; the middle get a call from the coordinator; the long tail get a message campaign with a reply path to a person.

Three segments, three treatments, one list. Trying to treat two hundred dormant customers identically wastes the personal touch on the small ones and insults the large ones with a template.

Call ten dormant customers from across the segments before designing anything and ask, without selling, why they stopped. The reasons cluster: a service failure nobody fixed, a competitor who called, a price, a change of person at the customer, a change in their business, or simply that nobody from your side stayed in touch and the habit lapsed. The last is usually the largest group, and it needs no offer at all — a call and a reason to reorder is enough.

Match the offer to the reason. Service failure: an acknowledgement, what has changed, and a risk-free first order back. Competitor: the specific thing you do better, and a comparison they can check. Price: a review of terms within policy, or an honest conversation about value. New person: an introduction, the history, the proof. Habit lapsed: a reason to reorder now — a new product, a season, a reminder of what they used to buy — and a person to call. A blanket discount to the whole list answers only the price group and teaches everyone else to wait for the next one.

The top segment: a personal call from someone senior, followed by a WhatsApp or email with the specific offer, and a second call a week later. The middle: a call from the coordinator with the script for the likely reason, then a message. The tail: a personal-sounding message on the channel they used — WhatsApp for most Indian SMEs, email for corporate buyers — with a reply path to a named person, one follow-up a fortnight later, and then stop. Every conversation recorded in the CRM with the reason given, so the list becomes intelligence.

Incrementality: hold back a random tenth of each segment and do not contact them. At the end of the quarter, compare the reorder rate of the contacted and the held-back groups; the difference is what the campaign added, and it is the number that decides whether to run it again. Without the hold-out, the campaign gets credit for customers who would have come back anyway.

The mistakes: one date for “dormant”; a blanket discount to the whole list; a template to the top accounts; no diagnosis, so the offer answers the wrong reason; five messages in a week; no reply path; and no hold-out group, so nobody knows what it added. A safeguard: before the campaign, read the ten diagnosis calls — if most say “nobody called”, the offer is a phone call.

Measure by reactivated customers by segment against the hold-out, revenue in the following two quarters, and the reasons collected. Then make it a habit: a monthly list of customers who have just crossed their dormancy threshold, called that month, before they are dormant enough to have found someone else. This is the reactivation work we run with SMEs — the list and thresholds, the diagnosis calls, the offers by reason, the scripts and messages, the campaign with a hold-out, and the monthly habit afterwards — and the free audit starts by counting last year’s customers who have not bought this year.