How to build brand loyalty with your retail marketing strategy

How to build brand loyalty with your retail marketing strategy

In a competitive marketplace, personalization might be one of the smartest ways to promote your business and convert one-time customers into loyal brand champions. 

Why is the case for personalization in your retail marketing strategy so compelling? Because according to Twilio’s 2024 State of Customer Engagement Report:

• Almost 7 in 10 Gen Z and Millennial customers say they’ll stop using a brand without it

• 4 in 10 customers say they’ll quit a brand if their experience isn’t personalized 

• 31% say a lack of personalization has pushed them toward competing brands 

So if delighting customers with relevant, helpful experiences at every touchpoint isn’t part of your retail marketing strategy, you’re possibly self-excluding a big slice of your market. 

Another factor compounding the challenges of ecommerce marketing is the disconnect between how brands view themselves versus how consumers perceive them. With 81% of brands saying they have a deep understanding of their customers, but only 46% of global customers agreeing, there’s work to be done to bridge the gap. 

A finely-tuned omnichannel retail strategy can enable a seamless customer experience for brands that use data and tools in innovative ways to forge deeper connections with customers across all channels. If you want to build brand loyalty with your retail marketing strategy, here are three brilliant ways to do it.

1. Map customer journeys as part of your retail marketing strategy

Capturing data across apps, websites and transactions is crucial for identifying the friction points preventing browsers from becoming customers. However, building an in-house data platform is expensive and time-consuming. That’s why popular luxury clothing ecommerce platform Tradesy turned to Twilio Segment, a customer data platform (CDP), for help capturing valuable customer data insights across web and mobile to improve buyer conversion rates.

Google Analytics provided them with basic insight to customer behavior, but it didn’t provide the granular data required for a robust ecommerce marketing analysis. Instead, it merely highlighted aggregated conversion metrics—such as a customer landing anywhere on the site or app and eventually buying something—while Google’s anonymization of interactions made it impossible to tie funnel data to actual users. 

With Twilio Segment, Tradesy increased data points from 5 to 100, reducing time to insight from weeks to minutes. It gained a crystal-clear picture of customer journeys to reveal exactly how people come to their platform and when, where and why they might get stuck before buying or listing an item. Consequently, this rich data enables Tradesy to sharpen its checkout funnel and other crucial user flows, as well as feed machine learning algorithms that create personalized product recommendations for each customer. 

Turbocharge ecommerce marketing with data-driven personalization

If your retail marketing strategy includes younger consumers, you should be aware that this demographic demands better digital experiences and greater personalization. 89% of decision-makers believe personalization is invaluable to their business success in the next three years, so switched-on retailers are finding creative ways to get closer to customers with their ecommerce marketing.  

Vacation accommodation brand Vacasa is a prime example. With Twilio Segment, it uses rich customer data to create highly personalized marketing campaigns. Vacasa connects customers to their dream vacations by gaining a deeper understanding of what they’re searching for, then delivering the right message through their favorite channels. Through Segment’s CDP, Vacasa unifies disconnected data, offering the single source of truth necessary for strategic decisions. This drives a three- to tenfold increase in customer bookings across its business, which serves more than 2 million guests per year.      

2. Personalize your retail marketing strategy with email 

Email can be a powerful e-commerce tool, with the average open rate for an email marketing campaign being 36.5%. How can you scale this intimate way to promote your business without resorting to generic “batch and blast” methods? E-commerce marketing giant eBay uses Twilio SendGrid’s Email API  to send over 1 billion highly personalized emails a month, using machine learning and open-time rendering to increase click-through rates and sales.

When you enable $84 billion of gross merchandising volume for 167 million active global users online, your retail marketing strategy has to be on point. Email is a powerful tool in eBay’s ecommerce marketing arsenal, but sending mass generic marketing campaign emails no longer supported its ambition to provide better value for customers with relevant, timely offers. 

With an in-house targeting and personalization CRM system built on top of SendGrid, the team created a built-in feedback loop to rapidly adjust product recommendations according to customer reactions. eBay used SendGrid’s reliable infrastructure to scale smoothly to 1 billion emails in just 4 months. 

Send ecommerce marketing emails your customers will love

There are 4.48 billion email users worldwide, and 81% of companies use email as part of their retail marketing strategy. Used effectively, email is like a love letter to your customers, capturing hearts and minds all the way from an intriguing subject line to a compelling offer inside.      

Take travel specialist Diamond Resorts for instance. It switched from its legacy email platform to SendGrid Marketing Campaigns to attract new members and keep existing customers sweet with promos, discounts and proactive support. 

With data insights improving retargeting and automation increasing personalization, there’s a 25% reduction in email deployment time, 70% email open rate and 90% email delivery rate. 

3. Manage seamless customer communication with voice and messaging

It’s been 40 years since I Just Called to Say I Love You was released, but Stevie Wonder was definitely onto something because nowadays 97% of Americans own a mobile phone and 75% of US consumers say they buy things as a result of SMS marketing. Voice and messaging can be extremely effective pillars of your retail marketing strategy because they’re ideal for creating strong customer connections and driving conversions. 

When it comes to capitalizing on voice and messaging as effective ways to promote online business,  retail platform Tulip deserves its flowers. Backed by Twilio, it achieved a 60% conversion increase with SMS text and 19% conversion from phone calls. 

A holistic omnichannel retail strategy creates a consistent and unified experience for customers, and Tulip’s SaaS platform closes the gap between online and in-person shopping to provide the ultimate flexibility and convenience. Client communication is at the heart of Tulip’s platform, and it wanted to send customer phone calls and texts at scale to achieve greater personalization. 

By integrating Twilio Voice and Messaging APIs into its existing platform, Tulip rapidly embedded real-time voice calling to its app and enabled customer journey tracking to tie interactions to sales. Furthermore, Twilio provides support for SMS, MMS and other popular messaging apps, so Tulip associates can contact customers directly on their platform of choice. 

Messaging for lifelong loyalty in ecommerce marketing

Messaging also lends itself well to customer loyalty programs. And since the US has the highest percentage of lifelong customer loyalty in the world, it’s worth incorporating into your retail marketing strategy. Remember, 59% of American consumers say once they’re loyal to a brand, they’re loyal for life. 75% also say they’re more likely to be loyal to brands that understand them on a personal level. 

Healthcare brand Allergan is adept at using messaging to enhance its ecommerce marketing. Twilio Segment and Messaging helped the company relaunch its Alle app loyalty program, connect with 3 million customers and drive $400 million in yearly sales. 

A legacy loyalty program app and fragmented data left Allergan’s personalization efforts flailing. But Segment now captures and standardizes customer data, provides a single view of the customer with Personas, and loads this enriched data into Snowflake, Allergan’s data warehouse. 

The Allergan engineering team has built machine learning models to precisely predict the best products, offers, and content for each customer, creating a highly-personalized loyalty program powered by convenient SMS messaging. 

Build brand love that lasts with Twilio

With the right tools, support and creativity, there are lots of ways to nudge brand loyalty beyond one-time transactions and nurture customer relationships that last a lifetime. 

An omnichannel retail strategy built with Twilio helps you reach customers more easily, makes every customer feel like they’re “the one”, and benefits your bottom line.  

Ready to build brand love that lasts?

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