Couldn’t join us for our exclusive webinar with Lob, one of our leading direct mail partners? Have no fear — we’re recapping it all here! Let’s dive into the best bits, top takeaways, and finally, an on-demand recording of “Creating A Customer-Focused Loyalty Strategy Based On Data” featuring Tatiana Afanasyeva, Head of Marketing at Lob, and Marina Ben-Zvi, Director of Product Marketing at Blueshift.
Webinar Recap: Creating A Customer-Focused Loyalty Strategy Based On Data with Lob
The current state of brand loyalty… or lack thereof
Existing customers are the foundation of any business — they provide a stable revenue stream (spend more per purchase and repeat purchase more often), are less price-sensitive, and promote growth by offering ongoing referrals. It’s no surprise that research finds that a 5% increase in customer retention can increase a business’s profits by 25-95%.
At the same time, customer acquisition costs have increased significantly in recent years. That’s why last year, as budgets tightened up, customer loyalty received renewed focus. But consumers today aren’t all that loyal. 49% would switch brands just to use a coupon and only 6.5% of millennials are brand loyalists. And really, who can blame them — consumers today have more choices than ever and are more informed shoppers who have easier access to information and alternatives.
Beyond driving additional purchases, loyalty is about deepening relationships with customers. Traditional loyalty drivers centered around delivering on your brand promise with consistently high-quality products, reliability, and availability of products and services, and competitive pricing But today loyalty builds from a positive total customer experience. And it’s not a one-time effort. Loyalty happens as a result of consistently offering high-quality, positive experiences, which can only happen when you have a strong customer understanding.
And a strong customer understanding comes from unified customer data.
How to use customer data to fuel loyalty
While simply having a well thought out customer loyalty strategy is key to driving results for your business, a truly great strategy needs to be focused on key themes:
- Reduce Friction: Think about how you can reducing friction at each step of the customer journey by creating workflows based on actions, milestones, or event triggers.
- Focus on Personalization: Nudge desired behaviors by tweaking messaging, imagery, promos, and offers through multivariate testing.
- Deploy Real-Time Optimization: Track and measure actions in real-time to optimize performance and maximizing conversions.
“Driving brand loyalty hinges on deeply understanding your customers — what they want, their interests, and what they are likely to do next — and delivering what they need. That starts with a strong foundational data strategy. To become customer-obsessed you first need to collect customer data from across your organization and tie it together into a single view of your customers.” Marina Ben-Zvi, Director of Product Marketing at Blueshift
“The key to improving brand loyalty is by creating an intentional strategy. And as you develop that strategy, don’t just focus on channels. Unfortunately, we see this mistake happening quite often — teams might invest in a super robust strategy for a certain channel, like email or push. But the truth is, customers don’t care about that kind of minutiae, they just want a great experience. So, as you form your strategy, make sure it’s centered around your customer and not necessarily the channels you know well or prefer.” Tatiana Afanasyeva, Head of Marketing at Lob
Ultimately, brand loyalty and omnichannel marketing (based on customer data) go hand in hand.
“In anything you do, it’s important to remember that customers today are being more channel-agnostic. No channel, on its own, is going to be a silver bullet — your customers want to find the product, content, or information they need, regardless of channel. This requires what we call ‘continuous engagement’, where you’re constantly fostering the brand relationship with relevant and timely experiences. This is achieved through your customer data, but you’ll need the right platform, like the Smarthub CDP to harness it.” Marina Ben-Zvi, Director of Product Marketing at Blueshift
Want to learn more? Watch the full webinar on-demand below or reach out to one of our omnichannel experts to learn how Blueshift can help you.
