During downturns and slow recessions, it's best to focus on your current and past customers.
New customers are great but if acquisition costs are too much your profit will suffer, not a great thing in a downturn.
An easy thing to help current customers buy again is sending order reminders. Schedule them to go around near the time they are likely to reorder so you can (re-)warm-up their interest in your store and products.
You can figure out the optimal time for these reminders with the Average Latency. Repeat Customer Insights can calculate that for you automatically.
If you don't do a lot of direct marketing, a gradual build-up is best so it doesn't appear too aggressive. In that case, start contacting them 25% sooner than your Average Latency measurement and continue the contact until at least 25% more days after.
Eric Davis
Retain the best customers and leave the worst for your competitors to steal
If you're having problems with customers not coming back or defecting to competitors, Repeat Customer Insights might help uncover why that's happening.
Using its analyses you can figure out how to better target the good customers and let the bad ones go elsewhere.