How can an Audience Orchestration Engine help with Retention?  

It’s easy for marketers to put all their attention on new customers and business development, but to achieve long-term growth, an effective customer retention strategy is essential. Here’s how an audience orchestration engine can help turn your first-time customers into repeat buyers. 

What is customer retention? 

Once your leads become customers, how do you turn them into repeat buyers? Customer retention refers to keeping customers returning to your business – and not to a competitor. A successful and sustainable business is based on a foundation of loyal customers, which begins with a strong retention strategy. 

Why prioritize customer retention? 

In a nutshell, the better your customer retention strategy, the quicker your business grows. In fact, companies that increase their customer retention rate can increase profits by over 90%. When customers become repeat buyers, loyalty and trust in your brand increases, which can lead to active customer advocacy. Not only do these customers require less budget to reach, but they are more receptive to brand communications and help to spread awareness for you. 

To turn first-time buyers into regular customers, brands must create mutually beneficial experiences with zero-party data to truly understand a customer’s motivations and intent. This process starts by understanding an individual’s product, service, and communication preferences to improve the customer experience. Rather than relying solely on behavioral data, create feedback loops and opportunities for two-way dialogue – and act on that feedback. Customer retention programs can deliver the most effective ROI, ROAS, and conversion rates through design experimentation and continual analysis. 

Key elements of a retention strategy 

For companies looking to improve customer retention, here are the core elements to focus on: 

Omni-channel strategy 

A successful retention program places the individual – not your brand – at the heart of messaging and communications. A relationship between business and customer is just that – a relationship. So your communications should not feel like a series of campaigns, it should be a continual two-way dialogue, hosted on whichever channel that individual prefers. It’s important to meet audience expectations around communication frequency and remember to be there whenever and wherever the customer wishes to contact you. 

Personalization 

To enhance your brand value, knowing each customer’s communication history, transactional behavior, and product interests and intent is crucial. Personalizing customer touchpoints with thank-you emails, exclusive offers, and relevant advice can go a long way in making customers feel appreciated. Every touchpoint is an opportunity to deepen customer loyalty. 

Audience analytics 

How do you connect with your most loyal customers if you don’t know who they are? Use your customer data to identify customers with the highest lifetime value (LTV). From there, use machine learning to predict the expected lifetime value of each customer and target prospects and existing customers with the strongest LTV potential. 

Predictive modeling 

There are a variety of predictive models to help marketing teams optimize their efforts and achieve strong ROI. Techniques such as recency frequency models, multi-touch attribution, and churn modeling can all provide valuable audience insight. These models allow brands to understand which customers to focus on, which channels provide the best retention rates, and where customers are most likely to churn. 

How an audience orchestration engine can help 

An audience orchestration engine can essentially do all the key elements of a customer retention strategy listed above and more. It will help get to the core of what motivates each customer. Then, it can use this knowledge to reduce churn and drive brand loyalty with a focus on three key areas: 

Data management 

Successful customer retention strategies require high-quality customer data. Allant’s audience orchestration engine can quickly ingest, organize, and transform billions of records from various sources, allowing companies to trust their data. From here, they can gain reliable audience insight that takes the guesswork out of engaging and retaining customers.  

Segmentation and forecasting 

Allant’s audience orchestration engine can identify a company’s highest-value customers and determine the best methods to engage and retain them. Using a matrix of customer categorization via segmentation, scoring, and testing, Allant can help brands optimize audience targeting and maximize revenue growth. 

Experience management 

Allant works with brands to map out and execute two-way, mutually beneficial customer relationships that improve the customer experience and enhance data capture. A continuous customer dialogue presents opportunities to find out what motivates them, how they want to be communicated with, and what problems they are looking to solve. This data can then be fed back into an organized and efficiently managed data pool. 

Understand your audience with Allant 

To achieve sustainable growth, businesses must hone the process of turning first-time customers into repeat purchasers. Recruiting an audience orchestration engine can be a powerful tool for brands to better understand their audience, now and in the future. By understanding customer motivations and intent, brands can deliver experiences that increase trust, loyalty, and revenue. 

Allant Group leverages data, analytics, customer experience management, martech integration, and strategic consulting services to give organizations a competitive advantage. Contact US to discuss the possibilities for your team in 2024.