Stay Competitive: Build Brand Loyalty Using Data

TL;DR:

• Repeat customers aren’t necessarily loyal customers. Brand loyalty means that customers have emotional connections, trust, high engagement levels, high rates of brand advocacy, and the willingness to pay a little more.
• These days, loyalty-building efforts are shifting away from traditional methods to data-driven practices designed to meet high customer expectations.
• Effective tactics to build brand loyalty include implementing a first-party data strategy, data unification, personalization, and customized loyalty programs.
• You can implement a first-party data strategy by using Jebbit to gather information from your customers — like when the cosmetics brand e.l.f. partnered with Jebbit to gain insights through a post-purchase survey.
• With BlueConic, Nexstar Digital unified their data, which enabled them to build brand loyalty through newsletter signups, personalization, and more.
• You can future-proof your loyalty initiatives by embracing trends like AI-powered personalization, real-time rewards, gamification, seamless omnichannel experiences, pursuing sustainability and ethical initiatives, and offering transparency in regards to data privacy. 

You want to build brand loyalty because when customers are devoted to your brand, the results will be higher rates of customer retention, increased conversions, lowered customer acquisition costs, improved customer relationships, and a whole lot more. The potential benefits are numerous, but how can you win this kind of loyalty among your customer base — especially when marketing strategies are moving away from traditional methods toward data-driven tactics? 

Customer loyalty is a complex phenomenon, but we’ll break it down into simple terms and delve into some actionable strategies that can help you foster loyalty. We’ll also reveal some of the emerging trends you should be aware of to keep customers devoted, despite a competitive marketplace.

What Is Brand Loyalty?

People who are loyal to your brand are the ones who keep coming back for repeat business, right? Well — not really! 

Sometimes people make repeat purchases because they’re truly loyal to a specific brand, and other times people make repeat purchases because the product at hand happens to be the convenient choice, at least for the moment. A 2022 survey by PwC backs this up: When asked why they regularly purchased from a business, the top reason, cited by 53% of consumers, was that they were getting a good value.

Yet, it’s shoppers like these — people who are purchasing from you primarily because they’re getting a good value — who are likely to churn away if presented with something they perceive as having an even better value. 

That’s why it’s important to understand what an actual brand loyal customer looks like. Here are some of the qualities you’ll find in truly loyal customers:

• Loyal customers aren’t just buying products because they have to but because they’ve formed an emotional connection with the brand.
• Trust in the quality, consistency, and reliability of products as well as the transparency of the company helps build brand loyalty.
• When customers actually engage — reading emails, following on social media, actively participating in rewards programs — this is a sign that they’re loyal.
• Loyal customers are likely to become brand advocates, which means they’ll write reviews and spread awareness through positive word-of-mouth among their friends, family, and colleagues.
• A loyal customer base is generally willing to pay a little more because they perceive the product or brand as having a higher value compared to similar products.

The Shift From Traditional to Data-Driven Brand Loyalty Strategies

As you can see, customer loyalty is a complex concept, and it’s further complicated by the fact that in recent years, loyalty-building efforts have shifted quite a lot — and thus so have customer expectations. Modern retailers are moving away from traditional, one-size-fits-all loyalty strategies like frequent purchaser programs, including punch card systems, and generic discounts. 

It’s no longer enough to provide consistent messaging, a positive customer experience, and a quality product. Instead, today’s customers are coming to the marketplace with greater expectations. More than ever before, people are placing higher values on personalization and relevance. In keeping with this, loyalty strategies are becoming highly data-driven. Marketers need to leverage first-party data to understand individual customer preferences so they can deliver tailored experiences that truly resonate.

4 Actionable Steps to Build Brand Loyalty

Wondering how you can modernize your loyalty strategy to keep pace in a competitive marketplace? Try the tactics below.

1. Implement a First-Party Data Strategy

To build brand loyalty, the biggest hurdle to overcome is getting to know your customers. That’s where a first-party data strategy becomes crucial. Through first-party data, you can get privacy-compliant insights into customer needs and preferences — and that’s what you’ll use to drive personalization. 

Tools like Jebbit make it easy to collect this kind of information. With Jebbit, you can create quizzes, surveys, product finders, and even gamified experiences designed to capture rich customer insights. 

The cosmetics brand e.l.f. is a great example of a brand that leveraged Jebbit to gather first-party data. They used Jebbit to create a survey that asks customers about their preferences and needs when it comes to eyeshadow sticks. Eighty-four percent of people who started this survey went on to complete it, for an average of over 11 first-party data attributes collected per user. That represents a whole lot of insights that the brand can use in future marketing efforts.

2. Unify Your Data

Useful data will come from a variety of sources: customer feedback on social media sites or via reviews, on your website, and through Jebbit experiences, mobile apps, interactions with your loyalty program, and more. To create individualized personalization, you need to unify that data so you can build comprehensive customer profiles. 

Nexstar Digital leveraged BlueConic to pull this feat off. For Nexstar, the challenge was to unify data from across platforms to drive audience engagement and growth. They used BlueConic’s pre-built connections to sync up their data without having to invest heavily in technical support to manually move data between systems. 

With their target audience data unified on BlueConic, Nexstar has been able to achieve some incredible results. This has enabled them to run personalized marketing campaigns, which in turn have delivered big boosts to both their customer loyalty and engagement. 

For example, Nexstar uses the BlueConic Dialogues tool for newsletter subscription signups. For one of their brands, 73% of people who signed up via a Dialogue opened up a brand email within seven days. Nexstar noted that this group of subscribers is also significantly less likely to unsubscribe compared to people who signed up using other sources.

3. Create Personalized Content and Recommendations

If you’re leveraging BlueConic to unify your data, then the natural next step is to use it to drive personalization, too. There are a couple of ways you can do this:

• Set up a Product Collector within the platform, which is a collection of product data that you can use for automated personalized recommendations. From there, you can use the Product Recommendations toolbar to create personalized recommendations for your app or pages on your e-commerce site.
• Use the Content Collector to aggregate all of your content, and then use the Content Recommendation toolbar to set up content recommendations based on things like recent views, popular categories, intersecting interests, and more.

4. Build Personalization Into Your Loyalty Program

One of the most effective ways to build brand loyalty is to build personalization into your loyalty program. If you’re using Jebbit to learn about customer preferences and BlueConic to unify data, you have both the data and the tools to make this happen. 

You can use BlueConic to build loyalty segments, which are the parts of your target audience that best align with your loyalty program goals. The idea behind creating loyalty segments is to make sure that your loyalty campaigns reach the customers who are most likely to take advantage of them. 

From there, you can connect BlueConic with Yotpo or another platform to help you manage your brand’s loyalty program. Bring in elements of personalization by identifying products or brands that individual customers have expressed interest in — then offer exclusive rewards or other incentives to engage them and encourage them to convert.

Embrace These Emerging Trends to Future-Proof Your Loyalty Initiatives

The rise of new technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning, plus rapidly shifting customer preferences, are causing major changes across the brand loyalty landscape. To stay competitive — and win over new customers while keeping existing customers loyal — consider jumping on the following trends.

1. AI-Powered Personalization

Individualized personalization is a rapidly rising trend — and it’s also impossible without artificial intelligence and machine learning. Thousands or millions of customers represent staggering amounts of data and metrics that need to be analyzed — and that’s too much for even an army of analysts. AI and machine learning can analyze data at scale and reveal insights on an individual level. They can then automatically translate those insights into personalized offers, content, and product recommendations.

2. Real-Time Rewards

Customers have higher expectations than ever before, and one of those expectations is for customer loyalty programs to deliver instant rewards. That’s why we’ll be seeing more and more brands offering real-time perks and points, rather than making customers wait a day or two for earned points and offers to become available for use.

3. Gamification

Gamification is emerging as a trend as enterprises seek new ways to build brand loyalty through engaging, positive experiences. Expect brands to add elements of gamification to loyalty programs — like leaderboards, winnable badges, and competitive challenges.

4. Omnichannel Experiences

The way customers interact with brands has changed. In the future, strong brand messaging will include the ability to offer consistent omnichannel experiences. To increase customer satisfaction, consider all the touchpoints that customers will encounter — point of sale, desktop website, mobile web, social media, apps, and more — and ensure that customers can seamlessly transition between them.

5. Commitment to Sustainability and Ethics

Modern consumers are increasingly more environmentally and socially conscious, and many actively make buying decisions based on how they perceive brand values in these areas. Brands have been making appeals to potential customers through clear statements of their environmental and social values — and now, some are beginning to combine brand values with loyalty programs. The ability to offer incentives like discounts on sustainable products or donations to charitable organizations is becoming a popular way to build brand loyalty.

6. Strong Data Privacy Protocols

Today’s customers are more privacy-conscious than ever before — and that’s a trend that will likely grow as time goes on. Brands can build trust by maintaining strong privacy and security protocols. Just as important is to be transparent with customers about those protocols, as well as about the types of data being collected and how that data is being used.

Build Brand Loyalty With Jebbit and BlueConic

Repeat customers are a wonderful thing — but loyal devotees are even better. With  data-driven tactics that leverage Jebbit to gather first-party data, plus BlueConic for data unification and personalization, you can develop the kind of personalization strategies that help customers build emotional connections with your brand.

Ready to learn more about how you can work with Jebbit and BlueConic to build brand loyalty? Schedule a strategy call with a Jebbit Experience Expert today.