Point Broadband - Winback Case Study

About Point Broadband:

Point Broadband is a leader in delivering fast, reliable fiber broadband to rural and suburban America. Its market leading streaming services deliver gaming, video and entertainment with Speeds up to 25x faster than cable across communities in the US.

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Challenge: 

Win back former customers who have canceled their Point Broadband accounts within the past year.

Point Broadband leveraged IgnitePOST’s Managed Services to execute a customer winback campaign with a goal of winning back users who had canceled their service. The IgnitePOST team crafted the overall strategy, as well as handled all message copy, design creative, metrics tracking, and KPI reporting for the initiative.

The overall goal was to re-engage former customers who had canceled Point Broadband service and get them back into subscriptions.

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Approach:

The IgnitePOST team crafted a two phase strategy for Point Broadband, aimed at maximizing their results. The first phase involved outreach to past customers asking if they could share their reason for account cancellation. It also contained an offer for the recipient to use if they wished to re-subcribe.

The second phase of the winback strategy involved using the information gathered in phase 1 to more effectively and efficiently position Point Broadband’s service to past customers and convince them to re-subscribe.

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Phase 1: Data Mining from Past Customers

In this first phase of IgnitePOST’s strategy, the goal was to reach out to a subset of past customers with a personal handwritten card asking users to merely share their experience and let the Point Broadband team know why they had decided to cancel their subscriptions.

Here was the message used:

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Notice that the primary call to action from the card was to ask the customer to merely provide some feedback.  Although it did mention that there were some great offers from Point Broadband, it was not a hard sell approach.

Additionally, IgnitePOST crafted a 5 email follow up sequence that was sent after the recipients received the handwritten card in the mail. The goal of this effort was to stay top of mind in a way that was not ‘salesy’ or intrusive. The goal of the email sequence was to remind the recipient that they had received the handwritten card in the mail and to ask them to respond with some feedback.

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Phase 1 Results:

There were 2 significant outcomes as a result of the outreach in Phase 1.  First, even though the primary CTA was asking the recipient to reach out and share some information regarding why the customer canceled their subscription in the first place, Point Broadband was able to convert 2% of these recipients back into customers.

This is significant because unlike SaaS subscriptions, switching cable providers is quite the undertaking and typically involves returning hardware equipment from your existing provider as well as going through the installation and set up process with a new provider (including getting new hardware as well).

The second (and more important significant outcome) was that Point Broadband saw a 16% conversion rate for customers providing feedback as to what factors contributed to their decision to cancel service in the first place.

The responses received were far more detailed and specific than the typical cancellation feedback Point Broadband was used to receiving.  This allowed our team to analyze and categorize the responses and then use them in Phase 2 of our winback approach to achieve even better results.

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Phase 2: Precision Win Back

After reviewing the cancellation reasons listed by customers in Phase 1 of our winback outreach, the team carefully categorized the responses received.

As it turns out, there were only a handful of reasons why people decided to cancel the service:

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Even better, most of the cancellations were items that were within Point Broadband’s control and on which the Point Broadband team had been working hard to improve. 

In fact, the Point Broadband team could speak to company wide initiatives that improved reliability, network speed, as well as customer service.

Armed with this insightful data, the IgnitePOST team crafted a new approach for Phase 2 of the win back campaign. 

This time, instead of asking for feedback, the handwritten note was used to speak about the various aspects of Point Broadband’s business that had been improved.

In this way, the handwritten note preempted customers’ major concerns and in fact gave them confidence that the service was much better than before.

In addition to speaking about the exact ways their service had improved, the handwritten note also included a powerful offer for the customer to come back and give the service another try.

This combination of speaking directly to the largest issues that the customer had, providing an offer to ease the transition, as well as delivering the package via personalized handwritten note was a powerful combination that produced even better results than Phase 1.

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Phase 2 Message:

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Results:

In Phase 2, Point Broadband was able to DOUBLE their winback rate to 4%.  By merely preempting customers’ major concerns using informed feedback, Point Broadband was able to get twice as many customers switched back to their service.

Further, they saw a 19% response rate for Phase 2, meaning that not only were people twice as likely to switch back to the service, but there was a significant increase in the number of recipients who proactively reached out to get into conversations with the sales team.

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Conclusion:

Winback initiatives are always some of the hardest campaigns to execute well. In the case of Point Broadband, the challenge was even greater due to the extra effort required to switch service providers. Canceling and returning existing equipment as well as the added layer of needing new cable hardware meant that Point Broadband had to be very convincing if they hoped to get customers to put in the effort required to switch providers.

A two phased winback approach worked best in this case. In Phase 1, IgnitePOST handwritten notes were sent to customers who had canceled their service in the previous year. The main CTA was for customers to reach out and let Point Broadband know why they canceled their service.

This campaign saw a 16% response rate and 2% win-back rate. More importantly, customers opened up about the exact reasons why they discontinued their service.

In Phase 2, the IgnitePOST team took the primary cancellation reasons from Phase 1 and crafted a personalized message to customers, preempting their cancellation concerns.

By taking this approach, Phase 2 had a win-back rate that was 4% - DOUBLE the win-back rate for Phase 1, indicating that by simply doing some customer research beforehand, customer concerns could be preempted and results could be drastically improved.

If you’re interested in having IgnitePOST execute a similar strategy for your business, reach out to us today! We’d be happy to work with you to craft, execute, and measure a similar strategy for your business!

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About IgnitePOST

IgnitePOST helps brands create magic moments for their customers. Our real pen and ink handwritten notes cut through the digital noise to surprise and delight customers exactly where they are in their shopping journeys.

Our intelligent software integrates with existing systems for easy set up and our robotics work at massive scale using ballpoint pens to give warmth to each note.

This software-hardware combination generates perfectly timed and crafted moments that drive customers to action as proven by our above industry average conversion rates.

Contact

For more information, or if you have any questions, please contact us! We want to hear from you: hello@ignitepost.com