In today’s digital landscape, the customer journey isn’t just a one-way funnel ending at a single sale. It’s an infinite loop: Once a customer makes a purchase, they’re now part of a new journey – one that encourages them to continue browsing for new products and to make another purchase.
Marketers can optimize how they engage with customers throughout this journey by leveraging an “always-on” marketing approach. Meaning, instead of running specific flights or campaigns designed to hit short-term targets, marketers can employ continuous customer growth strategies that ultimately sustain long-term business success.
There are multiple ways that marketers can launch an always-on approach to their customer growth strategies. Let’s dive into them together:
Always-on Customer Acquisition
Marketers might decide to invest in an always-on acquisition channel that focuses on continuously bringing new, highly relevant customers to their business. By launching always-on customer acquisition tactics, marketers can generate new customers year-round, not just during peak shopping seasons.
One way to launch your always-on customer acquisition tactics is to activate a digital campaign that uses continuous lookalike modeling to always engage shoppers who look like your business’s existing best customers.
With Criteo’s lookalike modeling, marketers share a regularly updated list of their business’s existing high-value customers (such as frequent customers, loyalty club members, or those with high purchase value). Then, Criteo uses the list to repeatedly identify and target new shoppers who exhibit shared characteristics and are thus highly likely to make a purchase.
Always-on Customer Retention
Once you’ve gotten your new customers to make their first purchase with your business, marketers can invest in an always-on retention channel that focuses on consistently transforming them into repeat shoppers. As a result, always-on customer retention tactics will keep your customers coming back to your business for more, while ultimately securing higher lifetime value.
Marketers interested in an always-on customer retention channel can invest in re-engaging their existing customers with differentiated messaging. This involves continuously segmenting their existing customers into hyper-focused groups. Segmentations can be based on:
- Shopping preferences (e.g. website, app, or physical stores)
- Purchase behavior (e.g. frequency, seasonality, high order value)
- Site/app events (e.g. the site domain they visited, specific brand/category browsing interactions, price specific events)
- Shopper events (e.g. items added to a cart, browsed a product)
Using these granular segmentations, marketers can then develop new test-and-learn messages for their different audiences, allowing them to address each one with new, distinctive messaging and personalized ad experiences.
From acquisition to retention: The power of data everywhere
Across all these tactics, the key to always-on marketing is high-quality commerce data. With data, marketers can leverage an ever-evolving understanding of their customers to continuously optimize new, relevant acquisition and retention strategies.
Marketers launching always-on acquisition or retention tactics should look for solutions that provide 360-degree identity-resilient understandings of their customers. With Criteo’s First Party Media Network, marketers can tap into insights from 725 million daily active shoppers and their browsing and purchasing habits, leveraging 120+ intent signals to engage customers at the right time and with the right messages.
Always-on in action
Interested in a real-world example of an always-on campaign?
Sephora worked with Criteo to launch an always-on customer growth campaign that would create personalized experiences for every customer, at every point of contact. By launching the campaign, Sephora wanted to ensure customer acquisition and retention not only in the short term, but also in the long run.
Using Criteo’s suite of always-on acquisition and retention solutions across the entire customer journey, the campaign resulted in an impressive 725% increase in ROI.
Drive value everyday
With an always-on approach to data-driven acquisition and retention strategies, marketers can achieve continuous business growth for the long term. With the largest commerce data set on the open internet and best-in-class AI, Criteo helps you continuously engage your best customers.
