New customers come and go every day and retailers hope to retain as many of these customers as they can. If someone is looking for a new pair of shoes, maybe they try a couple of different stores before they find their perfect pair. Ensuring brand loyalty then becomes a crucial aspect for the retailer, along with how to properly execute a non-​overbearing retention marketing plan that doesn’t push the customer away. According to a new report from CommerceNext, retailer retention marketing and privacy are essential to a new wave of customer-​centric marketing strategy.

How important is retention marketing to retailers?

With ad costs rising across the board, it becomes increasingly expensive to lure new customers versus effectively marketing to the loyal ones they already have.

CommerceNext asked retailers how they expected to shift their marketing strategies to their customers as people begin to readjust to their in-​person lives post-​vaccine. 69% of those surveyed plan to focus on retention marketing going forward and here are the approximate percentages who will use the following formats:

• Omnichannel Marketing — 55%
• Acquisition Marketing — 55%
• Brand Marketing — 45%

Seeing these numbers, CommerceNext analysts also asked which of 13 retention marketing techniques retailers were currently utilizing. Impressively, more than 10 of these techniques saw and 50%, or higher, utilization response with the top one being email marketing at 90%. Retailers are using the techniques listed below in the following approximately percentages:

• Email marketing — 90%
• Social organic — 75%
• Customer Service/​Support — 67%
• Brand marketing — 62%
• Content creation (e.g., blogs, newsletters) — 62%

“Top investment areas prove retailers aren’t just talking up retention, but that they’re really anteing up,” wrote CommerceNext. “Most retailers are spending on tech tools that support collecting, understanding and measuring the impact of customers’ connections with their brand.”

Privacy Concerns Also a Factor

Successful retention marketing techniques will bring customers back again and again but understanding the “why” of their return is equally important. We live in an age where many customers are wary of sharing too much information with retailers. They fear their information will be caught up in a data breach that will be expensive for them to correct. To that end, CommerceNext asked retailers what they are doing to encourage customers to share more or to opt in to receiving information

• Incentives, promotions or contests – 62%
• Email collection programs (e.g., in stores) — 61%
• Loyalty programs — 52%
• SMS collection programs — 50%

“We found incumbent retailers are more likely to rely on omnichannel approaches to collecting first-​party data from customers,” wrote CommerceNext. “With data coming in from so many directions, it’s no surprise that this group’s top investment this year is in customer data platforms and making data actionable sits as the number one challenge to their ecommerce goals.”

How to relay to your advertisers

So, what does this all mean for your advertisers? First, their retention marketing plan needs to be bold and consistent. CommerceNext’s survey found that bringing back lapsed customers was the retailers’ most difficult situation to overcome. Therefore, “retailers who build agile loyalty programs notice that they can iterate along with their customers’ specific needs and encourage high value actions.” Second, reassuring your advertiser’s customers that their data is safe will help alleviate a lot of fears, so pitch your services to develop an email campaign. AdMall’s AudienceSCAN data, powered by SalesFuel, has the information you need regarding consumers who respond to loyalty and email marketing. It’s really very simple; share this data with your clients and you’ll make the sale. 

Photo by Alexander Kovacs on Unsplash