Critical Lag
Every customer has their own unique pattern of ordering: some follow a definable pattern whilst others can be extremely sporadic. This makes it difficult to judge which customers may be at risk of lapsing their relationship with your business and therefore when it would be best to communicate with them. Often companies will group all inactive customers together and communicate with them en-masse to try to re-engage but this is not the answer…
Unique to EWA, Critical Lag is a programme designed specifically to address the challenges of customer retention and development through direct, highly personalised communications.
Essentially Critical Lag removes the ‘broad-brush’ approach to customer churn and moves to a truly one-to-one communication model. Based on the lag analysis and business rules, communications can be sent to those customers who have statistically fallen outside of their ‘normal’ purchase behaviour and therefore have a heightened risk of lapsing their relationship with your business.
Conceived and developed by EWA’s Customer Insight team, Critical Lag delivers customer specific communications that significantly improve retention, reduces customer churn and helps to build brand loyalty whilst maximising opportunities for product and service up sell.
The development of a Critical Lag programme is based on analysis of order behaviour, looking at the frequency and time lapse or ‘lag’ between each customer’s purchases as well as factors such as basket size and product shelf life. Once complete, the analysis is used to identify insightful and deployable lag trends and produces a unique critical lag formula which forms the underlying driver of an integrated customer communication strategy.
Communications can be tailored to deliver specific messages designed to encourage customers to continue purchasing or to promote certain products (based on product cross sell analysis) as a prompt to re-engage. These communications can also be segmented by customer value so the most valued customers (in terms of spend) would perhaps receive a telephone call with an incentive offer whilst other medium value customers might receive a simple ‘we miss you’ email or text message.
EWA’s Critical Lag programme has been implemented for a number of clients including a well known high street retailer. Over a three year period the Critical Lag programme increased annual revenue by 6.7%, generating approximately £1,000,000 of additional orders. In addition to this, the programme increased customer retention by 20% and significantly reduced churn rates.
What makes Critical Lag truly special is that the timing, content and channel of each communication is unique to every customer, a big step in reaching the marketer’s utopia of true one-to-one marketing.
Speak to one of the EWA Customer Insight Specialists today on 01245 492 828, or via our contact form.
Read our Marks and Spencer case study here
