Time for a ‘Welcome Back’ program for returning customers? | Farmer

A good welcome e -mail program can quickly become acquainted with your brand and start the relationship well. But what about customers who come back after chores? Should they go through the same onboarding process, or would something that reflect their experience with your brand encourage them to stay longer?

I started to think about this while listening Stef Werk With Paramount+, the streaming TV service, while she described her ‘Welcome Back’ program for returning customers -those who had canceled their service but were then written again.

I am one of those people. After I cut the cable cord ten years ago, I will subscribe to a streaming service to catch a show or a series and then cancel. Recently my mother asked me to help her register for Starz! So that she could watch ‘Outlander’. I assured her that we could cancel the subscription after she has finished viewing all eight seasons in 2026.

And then I heard Stef Paramount+’s Welcome-Back-E-mail describe and exploded something in my brain. I thought, “Of course you have that! It makes perfect sense!”

If you already know each other

If I have to be paid again for a streaming service, do I have to undergo the same onboarding process? Stef says no, that Paramount+ understands that these returning customers already know the brand, they can return for a specific show or series, and subscribe, cancel, cancel, return and start the process all over again.

In other words, they know me, and their welcome-back program shows that.

This also describes retail customers, who only shop with some brands once a year at the holidays, or SaaS users who sign up for a free program, cancel and then return to an upgrade to a paid version. And that’s why I had that “Ah ha!” Moment during the Paramount+ presentation.

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We can make a welcome program for just about any retail or SaaS-Vertical. But it cannot be a renewal of your standard welcome or onboarding program. Let’s investigate three things to consider when building a welcome program.

Three things you need for a welcome program

1. The correct data

With a subscription service you have concrete data points for subscribing, payment history, cancellation of the account and rewriting. In the retail trade, although you can use e-mail opt-ins and unsubscribe data to identify returning customers, it is often more a matter of standing out of rest. Do you have the data to indicate which customers are new or return?

Specifically for e -mail, can your ESP process that extra subscription after a cancellation process? With some ESPs, once you have canceled with one address, you cannot reuse it to start a new subscription. You must check that with your ESP representative. Make sure you have access to that data so that you can put it to work.

Your new Welcome-back program is another automated e-mail or series. You should not only know who you are taking, but also who you exclude based on the data to make sure that you send the correct welcome program.

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That is why you must start investigating a welcome-back-e-mail program by evaluating your data that will define your strategy.

This is your pre-work. It’s all about developing your strategy before launching the tactical work of designing and testing the Emails. Part of your strategy exercise is discovering which data you have, whether it has been formulated correctly and whether you can distinguish between new and returning customers.

2. What to say

This is the strategic part of designing your welcome message. What would be most effective in your relationship with that customer?

With a subscription service such as Streaming TV, viewers data will inform your message content to recognize the shows they have previously viewed and the categories with which they browse and stream most.

Your message would emphasize that show and include similar shows in the same genres or about complementary topics, with similar casts and stories. If that sounds suspicious like cross-selling or upselling in e-mail marketing, bingo!

A Welcome Welcome-Back-E-mail would have similar content that present well-known merchandise categories and new merchandise lines or services that the company has just added.

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The purpose of your welcome program is not just to say “Welcome back!” And show them the same content that they have looked at earlier, but also to use your data to save them, whether they stream customers or shop shoves after they have done what they returned to the brand.

This is where strategic work comes into play. Think of the consumer at that level and the behavior that you have learned during the data exploration. Your e -mail content is different for different cohorts of your customers.

Find out how you can talk to streaming customers who have viewed two shows that ended at the same time. Find out how you can talk to a customer who shops with your brand once a year during the holidays. It is not a simple message that says: “This is what you bought last year. Do you want to buy it again?”

It’s all about the connective tissue between their experience at the height of their intention and what else you have that matches that in this next phase of your relationship. Your message must be very relevant to keep that customer long after they have reached their original goal with your brand.

3. A way to prevent them from chibbling

A welcome back-e-mail is not just one message in a series. You essentially go together a welcome, an onboarding and a profit-back in a single new journey that is exclusively aimed at churned customers who have registered again. This contains a new message schedule.

As an example, for a series about a streaming service, you would set up a trip to send a message at the start of the season, another in the middle and another at the end, apart from other promotional e emails you could send. There is a lot of complexity there.

During the trip, the message goals will transfer from Welcome to Retentie. You say: “We hope you enjoy Outlander. Now there is something else that we have that you might like.”

And yes, you send a similar message to other customers, but you know that these recurring subscribers have a track record to cancel when the show season is over. So your messages must be even more on goal.

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The same applies to retailers. You would set up a trip to send e-mails at different times of the year with content that cross-sells and upsells, with products similar to what they have purchased or the next logical purchase in the product cycle.

You also emphasize your brand value, services, expertise and other benefits to convince shoppers once a year to stay with your brand instead of writing off after they have received what they want.

Retention and expansion are difficult to reach. That is why developing a strong strategy is the most important thing that you can do to convince customers to stay longer.

Accurate measurement is the key here. Can you follow the flow of people in and out of active customer status? Which KPIs can show that you have reached your retention goal?

The tactical aspect of creating a new welcome-back program is the easy part. Developing a strategy to guide your messages and then prove that it works is the most difficult.

Bottom Line

The presentation of Stef was an eye-opener for me. Her comments were immediately logical.

I should have been ashamed that I had not done this myself during my 27-year career, but I am not. We have to be open to new concepts, regardless of where we are in our career or how much we have already achieved with our e -mail programs.

I am particularly enthusiastic about the welcome-back concept because it can be applied to so much vertical industry, from subscription services to retail, travel and hospitality and even financial services.

It doesn’t matter that the idea was created with a streaming TV service. Everyone can use it. This will also help us to continue to grow e -mailmarketers as an industry and as individuals to ensure that we do this correctly to serve our consumers better.

Consider whether a welcome-back program Your company can help to be more hospitable for returning customers and encourage them to stay with you longer. If you develop a program or do something similar LinkedIn. I would like to talk about it.