The relationship between brands and buyers has changed a lot over time. Now more than ever, with competition on every street corner and Google search engine results page, it’s much harder for brands to capture — and keep — customers’ attention. This frustration can cause marketers to focus their efforts on quick-win tactics to drive transactions rather than long-term strategies to build brand advocacy.
But customers are people, not transactions. Your marketing efforts should do more than just push someone to pull out their wallet. To build lasting customer relationships, a consumer should always feel understood, unique, and important — from the moment they’re a brand-new prospect until they become a long-term advocate.
Unfortunately, much of today’s marketing technology hasn’t made this an easy task. While marketers are capturing endless amounts of data, sending out millions of messages, and building out their loyalty programs, their tech stacks lack the coordination needed to effectively understand customers at every stage of the lifecycle — and market to them as such.
Your marketing technology shouldn’t simply collect data, send messages, or count points. It should help you get a full view of who your customer is, share insight on how to best communicate with them, and nurture the relationship to build lasting loyalty. Here are a few ways a complete lifecycle solution built specifically for marketers can help your brand meet the demands of today’s customers at every stage.
Get to know your customers
You can’t build a relationship with your customer until you get to know them. And what’s the best way to learn their wants, needs, and preferences? Don’t assume or generalize. Just ask.
From the first moment you identify a prospective buyer, you should be getting to know them better; building a comprehensive profile of who they are and how you can best meet their needs and expectations. Our data acquisition solution, Marigold Grow, allows marketers to create unique quizzes, sweepstakes, polls, challenges, and more — so you can get to know your customers in a way that’s fun, unique, and provides them something of value in exchange for their zero-party data (that is, data they’re willingly handing over).
All this self-reported, permissioned data you’re getting can help you personalize your messages to each unique customer and give them the exact interactions they want — showing them that when they talk, you listen.
Communicate more effectively
Email, social media, SMS, Google ads… there are endless channels for communicating with your customers. But more doesn’t always mean better. Sending out messages that aren’t personalized, tailored, or helpful only makes it easier for customers to ignore them.
Don’t let your messages go to waste — whether figuratively not being useful or literally ending up in a person’s spam folder. Our Marigold Engage+ solution allows you to use the data and insights you’ve collected to create highly personalized, contextual communications and send them out across the channels that work best for each customer, ensuring every message you send says the right thing at the right time.
The more effectively you communicate with your customers, the more eager they’ll be to keep interacting with you, making it easier to progress the relationship with every interaction. And the longer a person is a customer of your brand, the more unique and valuable those one-on-one moments can become.
Build lasting loyalty
Despite popular belief, loyalty is not an end-point, but rather an ongoing phase that shows a customer is more committed to your brand than most. It also indicates that a customer expects a lot from you. Now’s not the time to let your interactions go stale.
Make sure you’re rewarding customers’ continued loyalty and showing how much you’ve learned — and continue to learn — about them. Marigold Loyalty can help marketers create loyalty programs that reward buyers in ways that matter to them rather than just racking up points for purchases. Show your customers how well you know them by sharing offers that align with their preferences, interests, and behavioral history.
Once you’ve developed a deep relationship with a customer, make sure you don’t lose it. Delivering the right rewards at the right moments goes far in maintaining the relationships you’ve worked so hard to create.
Keep listening
Remember: your customers aren’t static. Their tastes, preferences, and behaviors are constantly changing, meaning a marketer’s job is never done. Marketing to a person throughout their lifecycle as a customer is not only about building a relationship that takes them from a first-time buyer to a lasting brand advocate, but maintaining that relationship for as long as you can — which means listening when they tell you something new or different.
Because Marigold Engage+ solutions natively connect to the Marigold Engage+, marketers benefit from real-time data flow into a central system where it can be activated at every moment across the customer lifecycle. That way, the more you learn about a customer, the more you’re able to use that data to tailor experiences to them.
As you work to better understand your customers and gain new insights on their preferences and behaviors, you can immediately activate that information no matter where your customer exists in your marketing cycle. That kind of seamless coordination not only makes your job as a marketer easier, but it shows your customers that you care, whether they’re a brand new customer or a loyal supporter.
To learn more about our complete lifecycle set of solutions built specifically for marketers, request a demo today.
