How brands are turning to ad tech for customer retention

By Saurabh Gupta

Brands have actively been spending a lot of their marketing budget during the festive season to acquire NTB (new to business) customers, but we all know that acquiring new customers for any business is an expensive affair especially when you are a digital platform or service. Most of the businesses are not even able to break even of the cost incurred unless they have a good retention rate of the customer which leads to an increase in LTV ( Lifetime Value) of the customer. Also with a proven fact and data collected from multiple platforms every year, companies lose $ 1.65 Trillion because of customers bailing out due to personalized services or poor product and service. Also acquiring a new customer is almost 4-16X more expensive as compared to re-engaging an existing customer and it also leads to one more additional fact the probability of transacting with an existing customer is 45-60% more as compared to a newly acquired customer.

Considering this it creates a lot of opportunities for the ad-tech platforms to enable brands, and digital platforms with both proactive and reactive approaches so they can save and make money.

As a proactive approach different ad-tech platforms like The Trade Desk, Google marketing platform, Adobe audience manager, Liveramp and more provide diversified data intelligence across multiple touch points of consumers, which can be used to enrich the existing customer base of any brand/digital platform. This helps businesses analyze their customer digital persona across multiple attributes and categorize them in different buckets to create better and hyper-personalize offerings, this will help businesses to forge a deeper and long-lasting relationship with their consumers. In today’s world when a user engages with any digital platform the by default expectation is how they can be served with more personalized offerings by understanding their needs and persona.

Also to keep this approach Privacy compliant there have been platforms working on a Decentralized Data Intelligence framework which ensures the consent validity for any consumers, while intelligence or enrichment happens across multiple platforms. This will bring much-enhanced intelligence democratization in the eco-system while users will be empowered and have better control of their data.

The reactive approach is also being offered by multiple ad tech platforms in the form of loyalty points based on shared values, Cash Rewards, earn points, personalized Conversational AI, Email marketing, consistent feedback, Social media engagement and more There are different ad tech platforms and CRM tools who offer any digital or phygital brand to create customized journeys to re-engage with their customers after every stipulated amount of time, occasion and event.

Like travel season is going to be around the corner so many businesses will be creating marketing and sales funnels to increase LTV from their existing customers. Just to give you a deep dive into the highlighted points and strategy:

Loyalty points: Over some time has occurred to be a good tool to re-engage and translate the same set of brand values to your existing customers and give them a sense that the brand does care about them, and will always appreciate their business. The better the coverage and the more lucrative the loyalty points spike the expected customer return to the platform.

Convert their negative experience into a positive one: Always ensure the customer experience is great for any consumer whether it’s on your digital platform or physical store. Actively interact with them for feedback, the Easiest process is to implement a digital feedback system over any communication channel like Conversational AI bots mapped to the respective stakeholders at the backend, encouraging the entire business team to fix it, According to the reports a negative experience if fixed for any customer encourages him/her by 63% to revisit for the product and services.

Win back strategy: Many AI and RPA (robotic process automation) tools are available that not only record the entire digital engagement of the customer with the platform but also mark and highlight the status according to different created milestones. This is where pre and post-festival attributes kick in, Since they have already used your platform, now it’s your time to create strategies to map those behaviours which may be around abandoned Carts, Saved Later in Cart, drop off because of logistics delays and similarly more. You can re-engage with these different defined journeys to present different personalized offerings to help them transact for the respective products which might have been dropped in rush or budget during the festive season.