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You have a gem in your hands – use it well

You have a gem in your hands – use it well

"Acquiring a new customer costs you six times more than keeping an existing one.” Yep, we all have heard that a hundred times. But hang on…

  • Do you really know who your existing customers are?
  • Who the most valuable ones are? Who tends to return?
  • Who are the ones in danger of dropping off?
  • And if you know all this, how should you activate the customers and refresh your customer data base in order to keep it active?

At Custobar and LeadFamly we get the opportunity to meet tons of retailers, store managers, and e-commerce managers. It’s pretty typical that a few or even all of these questions are answered with “Eeeh, I don’t know”. For us, that is actually a perfectly good answer since it means we realize that there’s a great opportunity for improvement. Below, we will share some tips and tricks to analyze and activate your customer base and generate more business with your loyal customers.

Know your most valuable customers

They might not be the ones visiting your store the most. But you can easily identify them by unifying the customer data you have from different sources into one customer data platform. From there, you can analyze your customer base thoroughly, and it might surprise you.

This is what Custobar does for our customers. Custobar users are capable of identifying the value and potential of different customer groups with the RFM Matrix tool. The RFM matrix allows you to identify your new, VIP, passive and “lost” customers based on when they have been active and how often they have purchased, and to quickly launch campaigns or create marketing activities to reach these different groups. You can identify and compare these groups and immediately see where the most revenue is coming from.

RFM matrix

Sometimes a surprisingly small number of customers can be responsible for the majority of your income, and these customers should be taken care of in the best way. Once they are identified, the focus can be on keeping them happy.

Identifying the quality of your current customer data

It’s obvious that unifying scattered customer and marketing data into a single actionable user interface helps you gain insights and perform marketing activities effectively. The 2018 update to GDPR forced many retailers to reconsider the currency and validity of their customer data. Yet many retailers are still struggling with fragmented customer data management tools and processes that make maintaining the quality and relevance of data complicated and inefficient. Customer data is typically scattered around different systems.

Even if your customer data management might not be organized in a matrix yet, it’s beneficial to know what to aim for.

Going forward, all marketers and e-commerce managers should have a 360° view of every loyal customer and marketing list subscriber. The 360° view of customers is only obtained by leveraging data from various touchpoints on a customer’s journey.

Single profiles can then be grouped easily—not by age, location, gender or ‘the best guess’—but based on their actual purchase behavior or personal preferences. This makes targeting and conversion tracking even easier.

Customer 360 view * This is an example of a 360° view of a single profile.*

While completing the on-boarding process with our customers at Custobar, we’ve recently seen many different data management infrastructures. Whether you are about to introduce a new customer data management tool or improve your current data management systems, it’s important to identify the outdated data and actively refresh customer data. This can be helped with internal or external APIs by creating marketing activities targeted to your own customers in order to collect new data directly from them.

Use gamification to update and get a complete picture of customer data

All retailers that have built any level of loyalty programs knows that it takes a lot of time, effort, and investment in campaigns to collect marketing permissions and data about customers’ preferences and habits. This can be collected over time based on their purchase history, but it can become quickly outdated.

What if you could provide a better customer experience while gaining valuable insights about your customers? At LeadFamly, we’ve found that there’s a huge benefit to gamifying different touchpoint in the customer journey. We’ve seen a significant increase in conversion rates, coupon redemption and store footfall, and the data given in exchange is valuable. Customers are also engaged and happy.

Here are two examples:

Vero Moda uses personality tests for acquiring newsletter subscribers. While individuals take the personality test, Vero Moda gains insightful information about preferences and style. Then based on that information, they can personalise the newsletters based on customer interest. Another benefit of how Vero Moda uses the personality test is that it can direct an individual to e-commerce that suits their style and makes sense. At the same time, Vero Moda gets enriched data about their customers. It is a true win-win.

Vero Moda case

Coop has increased their app downloads with over 300,000 downloads. By adding gamification to the app and partnering with suppliers like Coca Cola, Oreo and Carlsberg, Coop now sees very high app engagement. There have been two surprising lessons:

  • The prize is not the only driver. Gamification builds a positive relationship with app users.
  • Coop has seen over one million visits to their stores from prize winners.

Coop case

We want to leave you with a few lessons we’ve learned and share with our customers:

  1. The most valuable customers are your hidden gems. Identify your new, VIP, passive and lost customers based on when they have been active and how often they have purchased and other valuable customer data from the various touch points. That enables you to quickly launch campaigns or create marketing activities to reach these different groups.
  2. A 360° view is the new normal. The 360° view of customers is only obtained by leveraging data from all possible touchpoints on a customer’s journey. Targeting and conversion tracking is much easier and precise based on the actual purchase behavior or personal preferences.
  3. Gamification can be your superpower to increase conversions. Engaging and learning about customers with gamification will enable the retailer to increase the quality of the customer data and conversions in every touch point.

 

Custobar is the customer data platform (CDP) for multichannel retailers. It combines your retail and marketing data into actionable customer profiles and provides the marketing tools for efficient targeted marketing and customer service in all touch points along the customer journey.Get to know us >>

LeadFamly is a marketing gamification platform that empowers your company to connect with and activate your target audience. Each of our 20+ game concepts is specifically designed to help you reach your marketing goals.Get to know us >>

Leadfamly has built an integration where you can easily connect Leadfamly with Custobar to collect and manage your retail contacts. The ready-made integration allows you to unleash the power of gamification in your marketing and sales.