How they achieved increased customer enrollment and engagement in their loyalty program through optimizing their marketing automation strategy.
A retailer wanted to drive customers to their loyalty program. However, they had overcome a big roadblock: their data was in such a state that they couldn’t confidently execute first name personalization, let alone a targeted dynamic loyalty campaign. An underlying cause of this challenge stemmed in part from the fact that several of their many brands were managing their marketing automation activities in their own separate platforms, so the customer data was siloed.
Working with Covalent Marketing, the retailer was able to significantly transform their marketing to be more automated and customer-centric by taking the following three steps.
Step One: Customer Journey Mapping
With the retailer's goal of a simple yet and tailored customer experience in mind, we mapped out the current state of different channel interactions, then designed the ideal future experience for how they would best communicate with their audiences through each stage of the buying cycle across their many brands and channels. This exercise exposed critical gaps, relevant data needs, and other requirements that for achieving this future-state goal. With these inputs, we were able to create a roadmap starting with the lowest hanging fruit, which was to enable the retailer to capably and reliably personalize communications with existing customer data.
Step Two: Data Consolidation
The experience map allowed us to define the specific data and data sources needed to deliver the desired experience. Armed with the ideal state customer journey and data architecture, we prioritized consolidating the disparate marketing execution platforms into a new platform with more robust capabilities, and integrated key customer data sources to create a relational database within the platform. This gave the marketers access to a reliable and comprehensive customer profile, empowering them to not only gain efficiencies in their execution, but target and personalize with confidence.
As a result of strategically consolidating data and execution on one platform, the retailer was able easily implement their first quick win: a simple yet robust customer preference management experience.
This would be the first of many advancements they would be able to achieve upon establishing a strong centralized data and marketing automation foundation.
Step Three: Nurturing Loyalty
Finally, we evolved customer profile to include in-store and online shopping milestones as the loyalty program offer and redemption data. With this comprehensive customer profile in place, we were able to find customers who were not enrolled in the loyalty program. We were then able to target this newly discovered, high-opportunity audience in two ways: first an evergreen banner to invite them to join the program, and then, when they took the action to sign up, a highly dynamic welcome journey with personalized offers and messaging cadence to onboard these new members and encourage participation and deepen engagement.
In just the first week after going live with these new automated personalized communications, we achieved a 2% lift in loyalty program enrollments.
We then further leveraged our integrated loyalty data to target existing program members to get shoppers in the store and as frequently and quickly as possible. Utilizing a test and learn approach, we ascertained that the retailer could get shoppers online and in the store by leveraging and effective low to no-cost offer, resulting in a significant win not only for customers but for the retailer's overall bottom line.