Customer Loyalty and Data Capture Delivers for Marketers
Part two of three.
In the heart of any holiday season when buying activity is at its highest, marketers have a unique opportunity to deepen customer relationships through Loyalty Programs. Initial sign-up incentives, like double points or “on-the-spot” discounts, are tactics that entice consumers to join a program. These enrollment benefits also incent customers to make a purchase and simultaneously benefit brands by collecting valuable customer data.
Loyalty programs come in all shapes and sizes, but the customer reward must be tangible and achievable for your program to succeed. Programs can be as simple as an email list which promises to notify customers of early sale notifications or new arrival information, or a complex points earnings program with multiple redemption opportunities. Beyond merely rewarding participants for purchases, recognizing other behaviors, like sharing a social post, is another way to engage program members. Each brand has a different relationship with its customers, so determining what is valuable to their shopper base is critical. Rewarding customers appropriately in exchange for their personal information results in a win for both parties.
Customer Data Enables Effective Marketing
Critical in every way, customer data fires the engine behind any loyalty program. The amount of customer data available, and what it’s capturing can mean the difference between traveling in the slow lane or speeding through any holiday season.
Your loyalty program holds valuable first-party data that can convert into a powerful marketing strategy. While a punch card at the corner deli will bring customers back, and possibly increase sales, it doesn’t help you learn anything about customer behavior. An effective loyalty program requires capturing each customer interaction with a unique identifier. There are several benefits to collecting the data. First, tracking this information enables brands to understand key behavioral shopping patterns which can be utilized to develop more targeted marketing initiatives. Secondly, consolidating this information allows a brand to group customers and identify “best customer” segments, those most likely to engage long-term with the brand – and most critical to retain. Lastly, the combined behavioral and segmented data can be leveraged to build more advanced modeling to improve the level of personalized communications with elements like product recommendations.
Increased Data Collection Leads to Revenue Growth
At Zeta, our focus is on customer data – we begin every client relationship by understanding what data exists in the database and what data our clients need to propel their marketing strategies to the next level. As a loyalty program grows over time, offering additional incentives to gain more detailed information about a customer, like their birthday, or street address, allows a brand to draw even more powerful insights. For example, after obtaining a mailing address, the brand can then match that customer’s information with third-party demographic data. Knowing about the behavior and location of “best customers” can also help a brand acquire new high-value customers in the high-demand peak season by focusing prospecting advertising efforts towards those customers with similar attributes.
How impactful is all this data? Our insights have shown that having a customer email address alone can increase your average order size by double-digit percentages, compared to non-collection of customer data. Having email plus other contactable information such as a mailing address increases that growth percentage even further. Check back for additional stats on how our clients’ programs performed during holiday 2018, and how to continue and leverage these programs throughout 2019.
