Holiday Season & Beyond: The Shift from ‘Acquisition Only’ to Retention & Loyalty

This piece was first published in MARKETING WEEKENDER Issue 355

By Rajesh Jain, Founder & MD of SaaS Leader, Netcore Cloud

The holiday season presents a fabulous opportunity for retailers from all industries. But have you ever wondered: why focus on optimizing your sales for just that one day? Why not use the holiday season as a gateway to earn customers for life? 

Digital Marketing 

Brands who employ digital marketing tactics face threats in two ways. First is acquiring new customers, and second is retaining existing customers. Both these threats hurt profitability, creating a lot of angst among brands.

For over a decade, brands have been obsessed with acquiring new customers rather than nurturing and creating deeper relationships with existing customers. Thanks to the large ad tech platforms of Google and Meta, which provide exactly what marketers want, high ROI for low spending, brands have pumped ravenous amounts of money, which has given these two platforms an almost monopolistic control over the consumer market. 

If brands want to tackle these problems, digital marketing needs to be disrupted. The crux of the solution for brand customer relationships lies in creating “hotlines” – a two-way customer engagement where customers and brands can actually “interact” with each other and not just a one-way push communication.

Four disruptions promise a change to improve the brand customer relationship. First, Email 2.0 can drive more interactions with customers in emails through AMP email, solving attention recession and eliminating the need for customers to get redirected from their emails. Second, Loyalty 2.0 can enable brands to offer “micro incentives” (Atomic Rewards) at multiple touchpoints along the customer journey. 

Third, a full-stack Martech 2.0 platform that provides automation and journey orchestration can provide a superior customer experience and drive more customer stickiness with adequate data available in a single platform. Velvet Rope Marketing is the fourth, which is all about focusing on the best customers and creating differentiated experiences to maximize lifetime value. This is because 20% of customers deliver 60% of revenue and more than 100% of profits. The key here is to calculate CLV (customer lifetime value) right and then follow it up by decoding the Best Customer Genome. 

In Conclusion 

Brands should focus on existing customers to drive exponential forever profitable growth. Earned Growth (a metric based on revenue growth from existing customers and new customers coming in via referrals) should be the North Star Metric for marketers. Email 2.0, Loyalty 2.0, Martech, and Velvet Rope Marketing 2.0 are the four horsemen to lead marketers into this new world. Get this right, and events like Holiday Season will be the best opportunity to bring existing customers back for more and ensure they bring their friends! 

Netcore Cloud is a bootstrapped SaaS company that helps over 6,500 customers, B2C brands and marketers create AI-powered new-age customer experiences at every touchpoint of a customer’s journey. Their customers include Bonuslink, AirAsia, TNG Digital, Pizza Hut Malaysia, Star Media, MyGroser, and Photobook Worldwide to name a few.