It’s good to talk – why ''on-going'', not…''always on'' personalised conversations are the key to next-level customer loyalty

High customer loyalty is a trait that all truly customer-centric businesses can boast, with loyalty programmes proven to increase customer lifetime value by 30%. 

Epsilon has created a series of video and blog ‘explainers’ to guide you through key aspects of customer-centricity. Topics range from calculating customer lifetime value and boosting loyalty to customer acquisition and incremental growth.  

In a nutshell

The key to driving brand loyalty is to engage customers in an ongoing, data-driven personalised conversation, but this comes with significant challenges.

Take these steps to overcome the barriers and increase customer loyalty:

• Identify your customer: Customers and prospects are incredibly difficult to identify and track persistently across the web. But once you invest in an identification solution, it’s easier to communicate with them on a one-to-one level. This isn't just talking to customers/prospects when they arrive on site, with routine messages, it's building brand equity by showing you know them.
  
  
• Go where your customer is: Customers spend very little time on your brand, whether that's on site or across other channels, and most will only visit when they have a definitive need. So loyalty has to happen predominantly outside of your eco-system. Customers believe you can earn their businesses with messages that are helpful and personalised. So, you must go where the customer is, and build brand equity with them over time, across your channels.
  
  
• Talk to customers on a one-to-one basis: Personalising messages at the individual level, is a great way to drive overall brand loyalty and increase your cross-selling opportunities. Display advertising is an ideal channel to do this.

Why is display advertising such a good channel for building customer loyalty?

According to Yougov users spend 66% of their time on the open web which is twice as much as social and google. Email is a great channel, but the nature of the channel means you naturally already speak to customers that are already loyal. When you activate display to enhance loyalty, you increase the customer connection. Display is persistent, and this makes it easier to create a conversation that lasts a lifetime and works alongside and enhances your other marketing efforts.

The benefits of leveraging 1st party data

Using data and learnings from display will help you scale across other channels. Display doesn’t only enable you to create ongoing conversations, it also enables you to collect data on customer journeys and apply this to loyal customers and new customers across brand, CRM, and performance channels. This data feedback helps you scale efforts in other channels to find new customers that fit those same patterns.

Resist the urge to sell first and serve second

This is a trap that many brands fall into and causes them to always be one step behind their customer. The ideal way to create brand affinity is to communicate the benefits of why a customer should buy, and buy more often.

Case study: how to build brand equity using the persistent ID?

An Epsilon client with one of the world’s largest loyalty programmes approached us because many of the members weren't aware of the reward savings and point redemption offerings available to them.

• • • • Our solution: Use data to target active reward members at scale on an individual level, whether they were on or offline customers, and share messages relevant to their awareness level and point threshold. This is evolved into an always-on strategy using serum data which drove loyalty and an incremental uplift of between 5% and 8%.

The bottom line

To increase loyalty and trigger incremental growth businesses need to look for partners that can help you identify customers on an individual level and find where they are in your sales funnel? Gather enough data so you can maintain a one-to-one conversation, and over time to increase brand equity.

You can find out more about loyalty and other key aspects of customer-centricity by watching our on-demand video series.