Loyalty marketers, the scope of your job just expanded. And, before you panic, it’s a good thing. Loyalty marketers have conventionally focused their efforts on customers post-purchase: increasing customer retention, enrichment, and advocacy. But brands and customers alike have faced unprecedented challenges over the last few years: including a pandemic, supply chain issues, and social unrest. The result? Brands have a renewed focus on deepening their customer relationships to support consumers through difficult times.
But building a deep relationship with customers starts long before the purchase. To foster real customer loyalty, B2C marketers are enhancing experiences at earlier stages of the customer lifecycle. Now, brands are even using loyalty tactics to acquire new customers, help them make smart purchase decisions, and to ease customers through onboarding. Does it work? According to our Global Marketing Survey, the answer is yes: loyalty programs are among the top five most effective owned marketing tactics across all stages in the customer lifecycle.
Loyalty is an outcome of customer retention, enrichment, advocacy, and acquisition activites. And one of the best ways to encourage loyalty is to focus on generating emotional connections with your customers throughout the customer journey. Emotions drive behaviors, and data from Forrester’s Customer Experience Benchmark Survey, US Consumers, 2022 shows that of consumers who feel appreciated, 88% plan to stay with the brand, 83% plan to spend more with the brand, and 87% will advocate for the brand. There are opportunities across the entire customer lifecycle to embed loyalty initiatives that will help engender loyalty in your customers and prospects. Read our latest report to discover tactics to use in each of the customer lifecycle phases:
- Discover: Attract and engage prospective loyal customers
- Evaluate: Make your customers’ purchase easy
- Commit: Overcome any customer concerns or doubts
- Initiate: Help your customers realize the value of their loyalty
- Participate: Generate customer engagement
- Actualize: Help customers identify the value they are receiving
- Advocate: Encourage satisfied customers to review and refer your brand
We are here to chat. Reach out to Forrester for a guidance session with us. We look forward to hearing from you.
Thank you to Ben Nagle, Research Associate and Cole Walsh, Researcher for their help in drafting this blog.
