Building Brand Loyalty That Lasts a Lifetime

Building Brand Loyalty That Lasts a Lifetime

Brand loyalty is the ever-elusive goal most companies build entire business programs around. The path for a band of loyal customers used to be much clearer — provide top-notch products your customers love and they’ll reward you with unwavering support of your brand. Take a classic department store for example: once one of THE big brands smaller and newer companies attempted to emulate. 

Now, their position is much less enviable. When brands begin to lose the support of shoppers it isn’t always because they’ve made a huge mistake, or their product quality has diminished (though those factors don’t have an impact). It’s because they’ve stopped creating amazing experiences for their customers. 

Department stores at the turn of the 20th century were a marvel to consumers — never before had so many goods been in one single, convenient place. A hundred years on, the novelty has worn off and the brands who want to continue to capture the hearts and minds of customers need to offer innovative, personalized experiences to every customer, every time. For marketers that might seem like a tall order, but the answer to execution is lying in plain sight. Existing customer data, that’s been activated, is the most powerful tool in the battle for 1:1 personalization.

WHAT IS DATA ACTIVATION?

The past 5 years have seen growing awareness around the need to collect and store data efficiently (CRM and CDPs) and the importance of using every touchpoint available to brands (new social channels, IoT, etc). The million-dollar questions that arose from these changes to the martech world was, how is the data we collect understood and then applied?

Data activation is the missing link within the journey for true personalization. Once data has been collected, stored in warehouses and filtered through management systems, it’s now ready to have intelligent, AI-power computing decide where it will be used and how. Basically, data activation is the process by which customer experiences are shaped by the entirety of your data. Each and every digital interaction a customer can have with your brand is guided by a holistic, up-to-the-moment understanding of customers—including all prior transactions, on-site and offline behaviors, campaign engagement, product interactions, real-time actions, and other customer attributes gathered across channels and devices.

AMAZING EXPERIENCES THAT KEEP CONSUMERS HOOKED

With data activation in your tool kit, every interaction customer can have will feel like how shoppers in the first big box stores felt. They’ll receive 24/7 personalized, relevant, and convenient service at a level that far surpassed anything they’ve experienced before. Brands have already found amazing success doing just that — think about when Netflix got us binge-watching with their hyper-personalized movie recommendations, or how Amazon can always anticipate our next need. Early adopters of this technique have seen rapid success, but the technology that powers these experiences were often built in-house and was inaccessible to smaller organizations, until now.