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The Most Expensive Customer Is the One You Already Paid For Twice
· By Vaibhav Vijay · Retention Marketing, CRM, Reactivation, Lifecycle
Acquisition gets the budget. Retention gets the leftovers. And reactivation? Most teams pretend it does not exist.
Here is what nobody talks about: dormant users already trusted you once. They downloaded your app, created an account, maybe even made a purchase. Then they went silent. And most brands just keep spending to acquire new users who look exactly like the ones they already lost.
If your reactivation rate is near zero, your effective CAC is much higher than your dashboard shows. A chunk of those "acquired" users are just cycling through a revolving door.
I spent a quarter rebuilding the reactivation engine for a brand where dormant users outnumbered active ones 3 to 1. We segmented by last activity, predicted the saveable cohort, and ran sequenced journeys across push, email, and in app messaging. Kill criteria were strict: if a cohort did not show positive value per recipient within 7 days, we pulled the spend.
The result: 14% of the dormant base came back, and the cost per reactivated user was roughly one fifth of acquiring a fresh one.
Retention is not a department. It is a growth strategy most teams underinvest in because it is less glamorous than top of funnel campaigns.
What percentage of your user base is dormant right now, and does anyone in your org own that number?
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