Today’s marketing landscape has been called “The Age of the Customer” – and for good reason. Customers expect consistent and relevant experiences that provide immediate value, and they have no problem switching brands to get it. As a matter of fact, 78% of them are not loyal to any particular brand.
Customers will switch for any number of reasons; their finicky actions are not just limited to price. They are influenced by concrete experiences in-person or online, as well as their perception of the brand. How can marketers meet these expectations and ultimately, retain more customers and waste fewer ad dollars?
How Marketers Influence Loyalty
Many marketers focus on loyalty programs only to learn that they don’t create devotion. If anything, they create transactions. And unfortunately, many of these programs are becoming less effective at driving retention due to their lack of value alongside the over-abundance of programs and offers.
Today’s “all about me” customers have higher expectations of their experiences with brands – before, during and after a transaction. In exchange for their data, they expect marketers to know who they are, what they like, what they have researched and what they have purchased.
The path to one-to-one engagement is to know more about the customer. Fortunately, marketers have access to a gold mine of first-party data that reveals more about customers than their transactions alone. With the right tools, brands have the ability to collect and connect all data from online and offline sources – customer attribute data, transaction data and real-time behaviors – and target their messaging toward addressable audiences.
People-Based Marketing: A New Approach to Loyalty
That’s where a people-based marketing comes in: By leveraging a unified view of their own customers, marketers can segment and personalize messaging across devices and channels, making every interaction with their brand more impactful.
- Addressable media is a huge opportunity to break through the digital ad clutter and engage with customers on a personal basis. Most advertisers only see an average of .06 click-through rates for traditional display ads because they lack context and instead feed the prevalence of ad blockers rather than engagement. Addressable media uses first-party data to target individuals, providing timely one-to-one engagement across all channels and devices, which creates loyalty rather than ad waste and frustration.
- Personalization makes it “all about the customer.” Using connected data to translate knowledge about the customer into every touchpoint in the shopper journey promotes engagement, impacting loyalty and retention in today’s consumer-driven environment. According to a Marketo survey, nearly 80% of shoppers say they will only engage with an offer if it is related to how they previously interacted with the brand delivering it. These engaged customers buy 90% more frequently, spend 60% more per transaction and are five times more likely to indicate that is the only brand they would purchase in the future. This is the picture of a loyal customer.
Marketers have a wealth of customer information available to them, it’s time to take a new approach to brand loyalty and put this data to use across all channels to truly make it all about the customer.
Originally published March 23, 2016