Partner Content
Given the virtually unlimited consumer choices available, loyal customers are worth much more to brands today than new customers. Strengthening customer loyalty and retention can help brands increase their lifetime value and fight churn. Here’s how to create customer loyalty and improve retention with help from an enterprise customer data platform (CDP).
Create Customer Loyalty and Retention
Loyal customers bring businesses more value over time, compared to newly acquired leads. They spend more money than new customers, make regular visits, and are more likely to try new products and share their favorite brands with others. In fact, PwC’s 2022 Customer Loyalty Survey reveals that customers express loyalty primarily through recommendations:
- 52% of surveyed consumers say they recommend brands to friends and family
- 51% buy mostly from their favorite brand but say they will use other competitors
- 48% participate in a brand loyalty program
- 29% own a credit card that gives them rewards and points
- 25% provide feedback on products and services
The PwC survey also offers some interesting generational consumer insight. When compared to older shoppers, Millennials (37%) and Gen Z (41%) are more willing to share personal information with brands in exchange for personalised experiences. Furthermore, the report notes that more Gen X and Baby Boomers abandoned brands due to social issues like charitable giving, diversity, and environmental concerns.
In order to address diverse, multi-generational audiences, brands need to understand their consumers on a deeper personal level. A customer data platform (CDP) gives brands a competitive edge in understanding how to create customer loyalty and retention with the following functions:
Derive Insight
It’s not enough simply to know your customer’s name and address. What matters is customer insight—an inside look at a buyer’s motivations and expectations based on brand interactions. Businesses can derive insights by analysing individual actions across the customer journey from a holistic perspective.
Customer data platforms are excellent tools for providing visibility into the customer journey. A CDP first builds a unified—or 360—customer profile by attributing first-, second-, and third-party data to a consumer. Then, it tags them with a permanent ID so every interaction is accurately attributed to the right person. With these complete, unified profiles, brands can then apply a CDP’s machine learning (ML) and analytic capabilities to extract insights about a customer’s current progress and probable actions.
Enterprise-level CDPs like Treasure Data also provide a clearer look at the brand’s side of the journey. Treasure Data uses a multi-touch attribution (MTA) model to determine which channel or touchpoint contributes the most to a customer’s conversion. This helps marketing and sales teams capitalise on high-performing touchpoints.
For example, a blog that successfully funnels visitors to a product page may make a bigger impact by sharing it on multiple social media channels rather than a lengthy newsletter. Or, for consumer goods, companies may extend a marketing campaign to reach post-holiday shoppers. In these ways, a CDP provides deeper insights about the customer journey compared to a first- or last-touch attribution model.
Identify Pain Points
55% of PwC’s surveyed consumers said multiple bad experiences would cause them to drop a brand they liked. Another 37% cited a bad experience with products/services as the reason for leaving a brand, while 32% singled out a bad customer service incident.
A “bad experience” or consumer pain point can take many forms in today’s longer customer journeys. Some examples include:
- Irrelevant targeting and messaging
- Inconsistent experience across channels
- Slow customer support
- Delayed response to inquiries
- Inaccurate advertising
- Poor product quality
- Poor customer service
- Pricing issues
- Complicated checkout process
An enterprise CDP like Treasure Data’s arms brands with critical insights to address consumer pain points and boost customer loyalty. Capabilities like customer journey tracking and multi-touch model attribution help pinpoint issues and improve brand performance. In addition, a CDP can coordinate sales, service, and marketing teams in order to address customer pain points on all fronts.
Combat Churn
When brands resolve pain points, they take an important step forward to create customer loyalty, but it’s still just a single step. Brands must be intentional with their actions to nurture faithful customers and sustain their allegiance. Too frequently, businesses stop at conversion and simply drop acquired customers like lead weights instead of actively engaging to strengthen potential lifetime relationships.
With the help of CDPs like Treasure Data, brands can employ several strategies to retain loyal customers:
Segment audiences. Identify which customers have reached conversion and group them into a separate audience segment for nurturing. This way, loyal customers won’t be targeted with irrelevant marketing actions or advertising.
Increase value. Analyse purchase history and find opportunities for cross-selling and upselling. Use engines like Treasure Data’s Next Best Action (NBA) recommendation system to determine relevant offers.
Reward loyalty. Respond to loyal behaviors—such as referrals and repeat purchases—by awarding points or offering exclusive discounts.
In summary, brands must plan beyond conversion to understand how to create customer loyalty and retention actively. Such purposeful actions include acquiring consumer insights, identifying and addressing pain points, and combating churn by rewarding–and celebrating—loyal behavior. Brands that leverage a CDP’s capabilities to increase lifetime value and build intentional relationships with faithful, high-value customers reap additional benefits when the same well-nurtured customers then help generate new leads.
Cultivate Loyalty With Treasure Data’s CDP
Treasure Data is a best-in-breed customer data platform chosen by Fortune 500 and Global 2000 companies around the world to personalise individual customer journeys at scale anytime, anywhere. Check out our enterprise CDP capabilities:
- Omnichannel Data Collection
- Predictive Profile Scoring
- Propensity Modeling
- Audience Segmentation
- Next-Best-Action Recommendation System
- Multi-Attribution Modeling
- Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning
- Customer Journey Orchestration
- And more
Join global names like LG, AB InBev, Subaru, Shiseido, and more to see what Treasure Data CDP can do for you.