Few things sting as much as lost customers. Whether you’ve been out marketed by a competitor, messed up a product, or simply lost your position on the customer’s priority list, having a success become a failure can damage morale and the bottom line in a way other failures can’t compare with. Fortunately, lost customers need not stay lost customers–instead, they represent a high-value opportunity, a set of very-well-vetted leads that you need only figure out a proper approach for. In this article, we’ll offer you three sales tips for winning back lost customers, restoring your morale and pushing that bottom line back up.

Prioritize A Subset

The first sales tip we’re going to discuss here is one of leads; not all lost customers are created equally. Studies have shown that you have the highest chance of making a sale to a current customer and the lowest chance when selling to a new prospect, with lost customers sitting between them–and covering a much, much wider range than either of the other two groups.

Within lost customers, there are subsets–those who left because they didn’t think they needed your product, those who went with the competition, and those who left in spite of their needs because of some tangential problem, like customer service issues. You need to figure out which group you can target most easily–this will depend largely on what, if anything, has changed since you lost the customer.

Once you know who you can approach most successfully, you can sort your lost customer leads and work on the most likely to reward your time.

Accept Responsibility

Chances are your lost customers were lost for a reason. That reason may or may not be something you had control over (or even something reasonable at all), but when you’re trying to win back customers you should take responsibility. This is actually build on the same foundation as countless other sales tips–individuals who assume responsibility for outcomes and strive to improve get better results, whether the outcome was really their fault or not.

If you acknowledge the fact that a problem existed in the past, and articulate the steps you intend to take or have taken to rectify that problem, you’ll get the attention of your lost customers. Fail to do so and your ex-customer will have no reason to expect anything better than they received the last time they bought from you.

Personalize Your Approach

As with any sale, you want to personalize your approach towards lost customers. Mass mailers will have a far lower success rate, no matter how good your copy–you need an approach that says, “I know this was your problem, I think this is your solution, we would love to have YOU as a customer again” and feels genuine.

It’s amazing how many customers drop companies not out of dissatisfaction with the product or service per se, but because they feel unimportant and unattended to. You only serve to reinforce that mindset if you don’t take the time to personalize. The more personal, the better–if you can sit down, read up on your lost customers, and craft personalized approaches to each one, you’ll see amazing results. If you only put a token effort in, you’ll get a token response. It’s that simple.