What exactly does every brand need? Building a loyal customer base is essential for any brand. Loyal customers willing to spend more, engage more, and happily recommend the brand to others. Plus, customer loyalty leads to higher retention and satisfaction.
To build customer loyalty, every brand has to be creative in giving great experiences throughout the entire customer lifecycle. Those experiences also need to be relevant and personalized. According to Forbes and Treasure Data, improving customer loyalty programs is one of the reasons for driving personalization programs.
So, how to do the personalization and grow a loyal customer base? Well, you need to have a complete picture of your customers and their relationships with your brand. Building a customer view that crosses departments and applications is one way, and you can do it easily with a Customer Data Platform (CDP).
What is the Difference Between Customer Loyalty and Customer Retention?
Sometimes we can not see the differences between loyalty and retention. You might think they are the same. But, even though they are similar, there are key differences between the two:
- Retention is the process of turning current customers into repeat buyers. Example: a coffee brand wants its customers to come back and buy other variants.
- Meanwhile, loyalty is how much they engage with your products or services, and their willingness to spread the word about your brand to others, not only how long a customer stays with you.
But, you must remember this, only because a customer renews their annual subscription or buys another of your products, doesn’t mean they aren’t considering switching to a competitor. A loyal customer never considers switching. They’re satisfied, engaged, and will stick with your brand as long as you continue to meet their expectations.
The simplest way is like this: Retention prevents your business from shrinking, but loyalty makes it grow. If you want to scale your business, you can not just focus on retention, but creating loyalty programs that not only keep customers coming back but also encourage them to promote your brand to others.
Why is Customer Loyalty So Important for Brands?
If your customers aren’t loyal to your brand, you risk losing them to competitors. Loyalty is shaped by the entire customer experience. Everything matters—the quality of your products, customer support, how easy it is to use your services, the rewards and benefits you offer, and the overall experience across all channels.
According to PwC’s 2022 Customer Loyalty Survey, 55% of surveyed consumers said multiple bad experiences would cause them to drop a brand they liked, 37% mentioned a bad experience with products/services as the reason for leaving a brand, and 32% singled out a bad customer service incident.
So, it is necessary to create truly loyal customers through relevant and personalized experiences throughout the customer lifecycle.
How a CDP Helps Execute Highly Relevant Customer Loyalty Campaigns
To create loyal customers, you need a deep understanding of the customer journey, so you can give them personalized experiences. Here’s a few ways that CDP can do for loyalty campaigns:
1. Create Personalized Customer Experiences
To give your customer a personalized experience, you need to know them intimately. It means, you need access to first-party and zero-party data captured across all your applications. This data will provide all detailed information of a customer, including the products and services they purchased, their interactions on websites or email, preferences or interests, and so on. A CDP integrates all your applications, combining the data in one place to provide a 360-degree customer view. With this unified profile, you can deliver targeted and personalized experiences.
2. Provide Personalized Service
According to McKinsey, high-touch customer service is the key to the future of customer experiences.
“Characterized by attention to detail, convenience, speed, and emotional fulfillment, this high standard of service offers solutions, products, and services that are tailored to each customer’s specific and unique needs. It is central to a customer-first mindset and made possible by the availability of data and advanced analytics to track a customer’s individual journey in real time.”
Brands can deliver premium sales and customer service experiences—whether online or in person—by leveraging historical data, past purchases, current website interactions, and previous support inquiries.
3. Encourage Feedback and Engagement
Engaged loyal customers provide a great opportunity to gather feedback on what they love—and what they don’t—about your products, services, and overall experience.
You can use customer feedback data to customize marketing and sales interactions for the customer, also to improve your products and services and make better business decisions. Means that your customers play an active role in how you go-to-market and support their needs.
4. Personalized Targeting Based on Customer Interests
All the data stored in your CDP tells how a customer wants you to engage with them.Creating segments in your CDP based on user preferences enables more accurate ad targeting. This ensures that your ad spend is optimized, delivering the most relevant promotions and products to the right audience. By understanding customer preferences, including their interests and favorite products, you can craft more effective cross-selling and upselling strategies.
5. Optimized Action Suggestions
Next action is a strategy that leverages data from marketing, sales, customer service, and other teams to anticipate the most effective next step for engaging a customer. By analyzing cross-departmental interaction data with AI and machine learning, it predicts the best content, message, or offer to present. CDPs with AI-driven predictive analytics are essential in delivering these tailored recommendations.
Building Loyalty Across the Customer Lifecycle
Many brands assume that once they acquire a customer, they will keep coming back. However, securing a customer is just the beginning of building long-term value.
According to a KPMG study, 85% of a company’s growth comes from loyal customers. This highlights the importance of continuously engaging and nurturing customers throughout their journey to foster lasting loyalty and advocacy.
With ProPS, you can leverage a CDP to deliver highly personalized and data-driven experiences that keep customers engaged and loyal. By unifying customer data across all touchpoints, ProPS enables precise targeting, smarter recommendations, and seamless interactions that meet customer expectations. This ensures that every engagement adds value, strengthening relationships and driving long-term business growth.
Sources: cdp.com