How to Boost Customer Retention, Reduce Attrition Rates with Martech

With a plethora of brands vying for each consumer’s attention, marketers can’t assume they will win a repeat purchase, let alone brand loyalty. That’s why marketing doesn’t end at checkout. If you want to keep your customers from straying to the competition, you have to stay top-of-mind from one purchase to the next without being obnoxious about it.

What’s the secret to better customer retention? Make your customers feel known and seen by your brand by delivering delightful and memorable experiences specifically tailored to their needs. That’s the secret to improving retention and building brand loyalty.

Advanced martech can help companies nurture customers with targeted and timely follow-up that reduces customer attrition. Here’s how:

1. Consolidate Customer Identity

Shopping habits are increasingly omnichannel. Consumers shop in-store and online, often at the same time. But if customer data isn’t tied together and unified across channels, a single shopper may be treated as two—or more—separate customers, each with a unique series of targeted messages.

But twice as many marketing offers doesn’t double your chance of success. Instead, the overlap in your carefully planned nurturing campaigns results in communications that seem scattered and overwhelming. In short, poor personalization alienates valuable customers rather than endearing them to you.

Identity resolution is key to creating a 360-degree view of each customer. It’s a tall order but possible with martech that creates unified customer profiles from online and offline sources, including web interactions, social media, CRM, loyalty programs, in-store purchases, third-party data, and mobile apps.

2. Map the Post-purchase Customer Journey

A customer’s first purchase is an important milestone, but a repeat purchase is an even greater cause for celebration. If a customer writes a positive social post, review, or a blog? It’s time to break out the confetti cannon. Taking time to fill in the back half of your customer journey can lead to more jubilation and less tribulation. How is your company supporting the journey across the post-purchase stages?

1. Adoption. What happens after the customer receives the product? Are you delivering on the promises you made prior to purchase? Do your messages confirm that the purchase decision was a good one? Are you asking for customer feedback?
2. Retention. A second purchase is great. It shows they like you. Now it’s time to reciprocate. Are you providing exclusive offers? Do you have a loyalty program or a brand community that reinforces loyal customers’ place in an elite club?
3. Expansion. Delighted customers may be willing to try more of your products. Do you have a way of predicting and proposing other products they might like?
4. Advocacy. Do you know when your customers are verging on advocacy? Do you have a program in place to leverage their passion and excitement? How are you making them feel like a valued part of your team?

A customer data platform (CDP) helps companies reduce customer attrition by tying customer behavior to the post-purchase journey, helping identify areas of subpar customer experience (CX) and where follow-up offers are on target. This type of attentiveness to customer needs can win true loyalty and build relationships that withstand even the strongest competitive pressures.

3. Consolidate Efforts with Your Customer Experience Team

Customer experience (CX) is a defining factor in customer loyalty. But all too often, critical pieces of customer data are dispersed across departmental silos. Case in point: The marketing department holds one set of data and the customer care team has another, and the technology each team uses is from totally different vendors.

Without a two-way flow of information between departments, follow-up and product offers can be drastically out of sync with customer experiences. For example, marketing might send an email offering a 2-for-1 special on the same product that a particular customer just returned.

Taking measures to bridge the gap with the customer service team helps ensure you don’t destroy hard-earned goodwill and brand credibility. A CDP supports this effort by providing a central data repository accessible across the entire CX and marketing teams. It’s easy to add computer instructions that implement policies that prevent a customer from getting an offer that isn’t likely to work—and which might even irritate some consumers.

4. Personalize Follow-Up Nurturing to Improve CX

Anticipating what a customer needs and when they need it has become paramount in loyalty marketing. In fact, 79 percent of consumers will only use a brand’s promotions when tailored to previous interactions.

A single customer may have countless interactions across numerous channels, each associated with a different set of customer data. A CDP makes it easy to combine information siloed across multiple platforms an organization, including purchase information from sales, browsing history from marketing, and support data from customer service. And, it makes updating customer data automatic, so once you have a set of unified profiles, you can use them with other martech that performs specialized roles, such as DMPs and DSPs.

With a more complete understanding of a customer’s history and behaviors, companies can create dynamically personalized, hyper-relevant content that wins loyalty and sales.

5. Build Loyalty and Cut Churn by Showing You Understand Your Customer

A holistic understanding of your customers can significantly drive loyalty and profits. For example, global cosmetics giant Shiseido scored big by leveraging Treasure Data’s enterprise CDP to organize diverse collections of customer data from online and offline sources. The first step was unifying 80 years of historical customer records while enriching the data with additional insights about demographics, sales history, and interactions. Shiseido dug deep into this customer data to determine how to design communications ideally suited to customer preferences. Each customer’s skincare needs, appearance, age, and even the type of “look” each person wants is different, and often changes with age and fashion. By tailoring messages and offers, Shiseido improves both online and offline experience, driving a 20 percent in-store revenue increase per loyalty program member and a 38 percent growth in net income overall.

Muji, a global retailer of sustainable products, has a similar success story. The brand used a Treasure Data CDP’s ID unification and CDP analytics to discover that website visitors most often browsed for products to later buy in a physical store. To ease the transition between offline and online channels and improve the customer experience, Muji developed a highly-tailored mobile app. Using real-time store inventory data, the app delivers data-driven incentives such as personalized coupons and timely, well-targeted push notifications. As a result of this app, coupon redemptions have increased by 100 percent, and in-store revenue grew by 46 percent.

Build Loyalty and Reduce Customer Attrition with Perfectly Personalized CX

Traditional targeting and segmenting is no longer enough to wow customers. Competition has increased, and so have buying channels. Missteps such as inappropriate, duplicate, or ill-timed offers can chip away at customer satisfaction and lead to attrition.

It takes a deep understanding of customer identity and behavior to truly see how brand interactions are affecting the post-sale journey and where you can personalize your interactions with your customers. Unified customer data helps companies stave off customer attrition—and increase loyalty—with every perfectly personalized message.

Treasure Data is an enterprise-grade customer data platform (CDP) designed to help business unify, analyze, and activate data—and help you build customer experiences that are relevant and enticing for every single customer. Request a demo to get started.