How to use customer data to build winning loyalty programs

Customer loyalty programs are key to retaining customers. Retained customers buy more, more often. However, data shows that while people are, on average, part of 15 loyalty programs, they’re only active in 7 of them.

“Build it and they will come (and shop),” doesn’t apply. But if driving more signups is not enough to make a loyalty program thrive, what is? Stacks by Kameleoon is an event where we bring best-of-breed technology companies together to discuss how they solve a real business challenge.

We spoke to Alex Matheson, Solutions Engineer at UserTesting, Josh Wolf, Director of Solutions Consulting at Tealium and Evan Wells, Solutions Engineer at Contentsquare, to discover what brands can do to create winning loyalty programs.

UserTesting lets you get feedback about your website from users in real-time 

Start understanding your customers now. UserTesting allows brands to get a solid understanding via the voice of the customer with its platform, which lets companies see, hear, and talk to their customers as they interact with websites, applications, or prototypes.

Pay attention to the customer data that’s being provided. Whether that’s purchase history, product preferences, brand alignment—there are a lot of details that come from those customer engagements. Customers demand tailored engagements now.

For loyalty, customers need a positive experience end-to-end. From the time they’re aware of your brand all the way through purchase, customer service, consideration of deals, and ultimately how they become an advocate, the customer needs to be impressed with the experience your brand creates.

Focus on the 10 essentials of building customer loyalty. These are:

1. Define clear program goals
2. Maintain customer-centricity
3. Leverage customer data/personas
4. Meet the customers’ needs/preferences
5. Reward customers based on how they see value
6. Use simple rules & incentives
7. Build in flexibility
8. Personalize experiences
9. Address issues and complaints
10. Communicate benefits/offers.

Orchestrate your data sources on Tealium for a complete view of the customer experience

Unified customer data is your competitive advantage when it comes to increasing customer loyalty and lifetime customer value. Tealium lets companies combine qualitative and quantitative data from multiple data sources, and incorporates customer interaction to build a unified, real-time profile of each prospect and customer.

Combine best-of-breed solutions for happier customers. For example, Tealium has the tools to very easily get customer attribute data and profiles back out to other martech tools to make sure that they all share powerful, useful data. With it, those tools can perform their job at maximum potential, which leads to happier customers buying more often, being more loyal, and signing up for loyalty programs more quickly.

Uncover insights through on-page behaviour with Contentsquare  

Don’t be led by opinions. Instead, rely on data-backed decisions based on your users’ intentions and feelings—not just their clicks. Contentsquare provides a holistic customer view with insights across the lifecycle, including UX, performance and product insights. This lets companies understand the customers themselves, not just individual touchpoints, which is crucial for providing experiences and solutions that they actually want.

Take a big-picture view of the customer. Where are people floating on your site? Where are they hesitating? We can understand those hovers, and understand that information between those clicks. What kind of things are they doing in between clicks? What can we learn about their intentions on the site?

Use analytics to take advantage of the data collected by other tools. For example, Contentsquare uses Impact Quantification as a way to say “Should we pay more attention to a certain audience [defined by Tealium]?” “Should we understand how we can improve their experience and potentially get more out of that cohort?” Contentsquare allows you to confirm these things and take the proper action required from it.

After you create experiences based on customer data, test them with Kameleoon

Every tool in your stack allows you to uncover more insights about your customers, which can help you solve their problems. UserTesting allows customers to directly provide feedback about your website.

Tealium lets you use this, combined with quantitative data from other sources, to build profiles and audiences. With Contentsquare, you can analyze how those audiences behave in real-time. All this should lead to new hypotheses about better ways to serve your customers. With Kameleoon, any team can build experiences and A/B test them without code.

While every company understands the importance of retaining customers, few are able to orchestrate multiple sources of data to get a complete picture of the customer. With so many touchpoints in the customer journey, leveraging a best-of-breed stack to gather, consolidate and apply all the data insights is crucial. 

For a step-by-step guide to building a data strategy from the ground up, go here.