When does the work of customer loyalty building take place? For companies that have achieved best-in-class retention and customer experience, the process starts before someone has made a purchase and continues for as long as that consumer is interacting with your brand.

Starting early means you can gather the maximum amount of data on your prospective customers and continue presenting them with experiences that will delight them. This creates a positive feedback loop, as each time you deal with that individual, the interaction can be better tailored, utilizing all the data you’re collecting.

Defining the stages of interaction

Though customer loyalty marketing is an ongoing process, it doesn’t always proceed at the same speed. Rather, there are important points on the timeline. First, there’s the preliminary work that goes on before a consumer buys from you. Then, there are the everyday activities as they become part of your customer ecosystem. Finally, there are the outreach opportunities to keep people from disengaging from your brand.

With the right strategy and technology, your brand can master all these stages and create a loyal, ever-growing customer base to support your bottom line. By breaking down each of the three key phases of customer contact, as well as demonstrating how a lifestyle marketing platform can assist you at these moments, it’s possible to envision a better approach to loyalty marketing.

1. Focusing on pre-acquisition steps for loyalty and retention

Is it possible to build loyalty before a prospect has even become a customer? If you take a modern approach based on positive customer experiences, you’re well on your way to winning people over before their first purchases.

Pre-acquisition prep work to stream prospects into loyalty programs starts with customer engagement. By running the data on your prospective customers’ wants and needs — the components of their lifestyle — you can create offers that will match their deeply held long-term goals.

Once you’ve segmented your prospective audience based on your current customers’ profiles, it’s time to generate incentives and offers that will bring in business. These should involve no-strings-attached benefits for first-time engagements. Follow these gifts up with gamification and positive, enjoyable interactions and you’ve captured new customers for your lifestyle marketing ecosystem.

Gamification is a critical element, as these enjoyable and digital experiences have been proven to keep users more engaged. Gartner stated that gamification can boost both customer retention and new business acquisition.

Why use Perx to create your loyalty ecosystem?

Perx’s recently launched lifestyle marketing platform is the perfect technology tool for brands hoping to capture business through the power of customer experience. How does it work?

The Perx Loyalty Engagement Platform enables brands to lead with engagement and not loyalty, innovate beyond their core business models and create monetizable lifestyle ecosystems around their closed-loop network of consumers, partners, and merchants. This approach not only allows brands globally to better address and solve customer lifestyle wants and needs but also builds a moat around those customers by drastically increasing brand touchpoints. With advanced gamification and campaign automation capabilities, hyper-personalized and instantly gratifying incentives, the platform has proven to be an effective enabler of the digital lifestyle ecosystems for enterprises and digital natives.

Anna Gong, Perx CEO and founder

2. Leveraging a customer loyalty program for first time and repeat buyers

Customer loyalty programs work best when they encourage consistent engagement between your audience and your brand. This means rewards and incentives should exceed the traditional “earn and burn” points model, which could leave consumers unable to accomplish anything worthwhile for long periods of time.

Personalization is key, as users are less likely to disengage from your ecosystem if you keep offering them meaningful incentives. Continuous engagement starts with the bonus you use to attract first-time buyers and proceeds from there, welcoming these consumers into your loyalty ecosystem.

Generation Z customers, growing up as digital natives, can be especially demanding when it comes to brand experiences. Give these young shoppers generic or non-engaging interaction and reward options and they may not pay attention.

How does the Perx platform bring customers from intake to loyalty?

The Perx lifestyle marketing platform supports consistent meaningful interactions designed to delight customers and keep them deeply engaged.

In our recent execution with Perx, we drove over a million customer actions, targeting a specific test segment, in just 100 days from the point of onboarding, and over 70% of them were actions that contributed to the top-line growth of the brands.

Stephanie Kubota, RUSH CEO

3. Rescuing customers from post-action disengagement with loyalty retention

After you’ve captured customers, you need to make sure they never have a reason to desert your ecosystem. What drives people away from companies? In short, the issue is negative experiences.

According to PricewaterhouseCoopers research, 59% of consumers in the U.S. will stop dealing with a brand they love if that company has given them several bad experiences. For 17% of customers, all it will take is one bad interaction to destroy the brand-client bond.

When your lifestyle marketing, customer experience and retention efforts are based around accurate, up-to-date data, you can adjust in real time to make sure you’re on the right track. If consumers are unhappy, you can detect the issue and respond right away. If they’re even becoming ambivalent, it may be time to offer up reminders of the rewards available.

How does the Perx platform help brands keep their customers loyal?

By using data to help companies build customer relationships around valuable, high-impact interactions, the Perx platform delivers consistent positive experiences.

Unlike other solutions, Perx’s Loyalty Engagement Platform actually drives meaningful customer engagements and is built to digitally engage better. An outcome of that is more customer stickiness and real customer actions that contribute to the top-line.

Maneesh Verma, Starhub VP of customer lifecycle management

Customer Loyalty Marketing Enabled by Perx

When your brand wants to commit to every step of the customer journey, from pre-purchase offers to everyday interactions and churn-stopping outreach, Perx is the ideal platform for you.

Learn how the increased number of touchpoints and focus on continuous engagement can help our brand: watch a video overview or request a demo.