The Key To Customer Retention Is Personalized Outreach

Pay attention to your customers’ wants and needs and they’ll pay more attention to you

Retaining customers is more challenging today than ever before. Digital marketplaces make it harder to stand out. The COVID-driven e-commerce boom that drove increased transactions also nudged many shoppers to buy from a wider range of retailers. And of course, data-driven targeting continues to go through turmoil, thanks to massive shifts driven by tech giants and regulators.

But all is hardly lost. During the last day of CM Group’s Signals22 online conference, representatives from Loyalty360 , TGI Fridays , Thermen Resorts , Flavier and others revealed how they are adjusting their customer retention strategies. Solutions include steps to forging lasting relationships with consumers, while looking to improve their lifetime value as customers as well.?

Some of the key highlights include:?

Brands believe in personalization, but they are grappling with how to fund it, and where to put it

Mark Johnson , CEO, Loyalty360, speaks regularly with marketers across multiple industries, and highlighted how crucial personalization is for brands looking to bolster retention .

That doesn’t mean it's an easy thing to execute. The more marketers look to drive granular personalization in their shopping experiences, the more costly and complicated it can become.

Which is all well and good, as long as it works. That’s an open question for many marketers, Johnson said.?

“How do you do it at scale, but more importantly, how do you do it at scale that can lead to measurable change?”

Besides proving the value of personalization, large marketing organizations have to figure out which teams should manage this endeavor. Is personalization the responsibility of customer loyalty teams? The customer experience group? Everyone? The answer to these questions will have an impact on which technologies are employed, and more importantly, which metrics are used to make decisions.

“One of the things we do is we ask brands what they are currently getting from their customer loyalty strategists and their customer loyalty technology or what they need,” he said. “And by far and away, reporting analytics are the number one thing they need help with.”?

Focus on the loyalists

Given the increased number of digital shoppers over the past few years, as well as new customers trying out various purchasing and pick-up methods such as Buy Online Pick Up in Store (BOPIS), it’s tempting for brands to dramatically leverage their entire database. But in a more volatile market, the best customers are often the ones who have been with you for the longest time, said Paula Thomas , host of the Let's Talk Loyalty podcast. And they need your attention.

“Unless you really love your customers, particularly those kind of top-tier customers, you absolutely can't build a sustainable business,” she said.?

Loyalty programs have proven to be more valuable than ever for many industries , Thomas added. For example, in the airline industry, which was rocked by the pandemic, loyalty programs became “a stable recurring source of revenue,” she noted. “It’s easier to sell air miles than it is to actually sell airline seats. So yeah, absolutely. I think that's why [retention efforts] have come on the radar at a more senior levels.”

Emotional connections matter, and there are numerous ways to make them

Coming out of the last few years, many consumers have been impacted by high levels of health and economic anxiety. Therefore, brands that make an effort to address some of those feelings can generate a great degree of loyalty. A recent example was orchestrated by McDonald’s, which handed out thousands of gift cards for free coffee, allowing customers to use them or share them with friends and family.

“I thought that that was an exceptional way to actually just have people having conversations about McDonald's coffee in a way that felt very generous, and clearly an emotional connection,” Thomas said. “Post-pandemic opportunity is really thinking through what you want to stand for, what kind of business you want to be.”??

Another way marketers are helping customers feel seen, and better served, is through content. Thomas mentioned the example of beauty brands delivering valuable information about skincare for pregnant women via a podcast as being not just highly relevant for customers, but demonstrating a level of personal understanding.??

“I really think… content is extremely important,” Thomas said.

Tea De?man , Head of CRM, Flaviar, would tend to agree. Her company uses different content strategies for existing customers and new ones . Someone who is searching for articles about cocktails may just want basic cocktail content sent to them via email, while a person seeking certain high-end spirits will receive offers on luxury products.

Email may be the ideal retention tool, but the path to more signups is changing

Across the board, we’ve seen an increased emphasis on brands looking to drive more email signups. Long viewed as a strong retention tool, email has become even more crucial as third-party data becomes less accessible.

Plus, customers that are willing to sign up for a company's email products are “in a brands’ control” like almost no other format.

“The email channel is really, really important to us because we can track every single piece of revenue that comes from that email and especially if there's a loyal guest attached to that email as well,” said Katie Knight Revenue Officer, TGI Fridays.

Acquiring more email addresses is the tricky part, as the way customers find brands today has changed . TGI Friday’s is seeing far more consumers use TikTok to find local restaurant recommendations versus search engines. So the company needs to make sure it is as discoverable as possible via the massively popular app, and find a way to convert those viewers into? known contacts.?

At the same time, the pandemic drove online ordering and food delivery to unseen heights, which can help companies like TGI Fridays have more direct relationships with customers… or not.?

That’s because more and more diners are using third-party aggregators like GrubHub or UberEats to find dinner options, while fewer are arriving via Instagram and Facebook ads, said Knight.

“A lot of our paid media efforts are around driving to an online order for pickup or for delivery,” she said. “We want to convert that guest through getting their email address, so that we're able to remarket to them later. So for us, that is the most important channel.”

Ultimately, regardless of the communication format or platform, the intent remains the same — create emotional connections with customers, reward the most loyal, and implement a retention system that can scale.?

To learn more about the Retention stage of Relationship Marketing and how relevant engagement can help your efforts, visit the Signals22 website to watch the Sessions and many others available, now on-demand