Customer advocacy: How to turn fans into brand promoters
Customer advocacy marketing helps brands build loyalty by turning their biggest fans into advocates.
The AI explosion we’ve seen in marketing technology is having a huge impact on customer loyalty software platforms and solutions. Most notably, AI-powered personalization is improving in leaps and bounds, bringing marketers closer to the promised land of true 1:1 personalization – the ultimate driver of customer loyalty.
This is a priority for brands as customers are bombarded with sales messaging from competitors. To stand out and keep customers’ eyes on what you have to offer, you need to ensure that customers feel seen, heard and understood.
Personalization is the key to making this happen. By understanding and catering to the likes, needs and preferences of individual customers, marketers can create unique experiences that make customers feel seen and appreciated, cultivating loyalty.
Here are seven ways martech technologies like customer loyalty software help drive personalization strategies that keep customers coming back:
- Utilize AI-powered customer insights
- Reward customers for their social engagement
- Create personalized rewards
- Integrate loyalty programs across channels
- Proactively promote loyalty programs
- Drive engagement with gamification
- Celebrate milestones with personalized notifications
1. Use customer loyalty software for AI insights
To personalize marketing and build the engagement, trust and loyalty, you need the right insights. This comes with good news and bad news.
The good news is that this information is readily available in the form of customer, sales and product data. The bad news? In order to get the level of insight needed to personalize at scale and tangibly strengthen customer relationships, you’ll need to sort through a LOT of data.
By hand, that’s a full-time job for a team of data scientists. With AI, it can be done in the blink of an eye.
By integrating with loyalty solutions with customer engagement platforms, days of tedious data analysis can be processed quickly to quickly uncover insights that are crucial for personalization.
By analyzing complex patterns in customer behavior and preferences, these loyalty software solutions provide actionable insights that help craft highly targeted, effective loyalty strategies.
2. Connect social engagement to loyalty rewards
Social media is a powerhouse for reach and customer engagement – but it’s also a potent tool when it comes to cultivating customer loyalty. In fact, with the right omnichannel customer loyalty software platform, you can identify, incentivize and reward your customers for interacting with your brand on social media.
This kind of powerful marketing technology allow you to tie key social media actions – such as liking, commenting, sharing and following – to unique loyalty rewards, helping boost your reach and grow a community of loyal, engaged customers at the same time. It’s a win-win for everyone involved.
3. Create personalized rewards customers will love
As humans, our monkey brains are hard-wired towards activities that provide clear, achievable, and repeatable rewards. If brands tailor those rewards to the interests of their audience, they can harness that behavioral psychology and take it to the next level.
Doing this manually on an individual level would be a near-impossible task. AI-driven loyalty platforms speed the process, allowing brands to offer personalized, tailored loyalty rewards at scale.
These software platforms enable brands to deliver a wide range of rewards that cater to diverse customer preferences, helping ensure that every one of loyalty members finds value in the program.
4. Integrate customer loyalty across channels
From flawless customer service to a seamless cross-channel shopping experience, the modern customer expects more from your brand than ever before. To meet these customer expectations, loyalty programs must be accessible to customers no matter where they choose to engage.
Integrating loyalty programs with key marketing channels makes it easy for customers to engage, collect points, and redeem rewards, no matter where they prefer to shop. However, when trying to manage this process manually, fragmented data and disconnected channels make it impossible to deliver a connected, personalized experience.
Customer loyalty technology provides a single, centralized platform to manage all marketing channels, giving you a heads-up view of what’s working and what needs improvement.
Building these platforms into an e-commerce tech stack synchronizes loyalty data across every touchpoint, ensuring a smooth and consistent experience. By offering a seamless loyalty journey, you can significantly boost engagement, satisfaction, and long-term loyalty.
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5. Automate loyalty program promotions
When it comes to customer loyalty programs, visibility is everything. Put simply, if customers don’t know you offer a loyalty program, it doesn’t matter how valuable and tailored the rewards are – nobody will engage.
In order for a loyalty program to succeed, actively promote it to both new and existing customers, keeping your pipeline of loyalty members full and flowing.
Marketing automation is your friend here. When integrated with a customer loyalty software platform, it will leverage product, sales and customer data to identify key customer segments, helping create email automations that proactively drive loyalty program sign-ups.
6. Drive engagement with gamification
Time for some more monkey brain psychology. Ever wonder why games are so addictive? Gamification taps into our natural desires for achievement, competition, and recognition.
By tapping into human nature’s competitive and prize-seeking instincts, customer loyalty technology can help use gamification tactics like badging, leaderboards and contests to excite customers and motivate them to engage with your brand and keep coming back.
The result? A powerful, easy-to-implement tactic that injects fun into the customer loyalty program experience. It encourages repeat interactions, because when customers see their progress towards loyalty tiers, or on leaderboards, they’re motivated to keep coming back.
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7. Celebrate loyalty milestones
You want your loyalty members to feel seen and valued, so why not make their journey with your brand as rewarding as possible?
Celebrating key customer milestones, such as loyalty tier upgrades, is a powerful way to improve customer satisfaction, drive engagement and deepen their sense of loyalty.
Use a customer loyalty software platform to build email automations that trigger when customers go up a loyalty tier, and fill those emails with information on the benefits customers have unlocked to encourage further engagement and make them excited about what’s next. This strategy ensures customers feel connected and appreciated, fostering a deeper bond with your brand.