Today’s blog takes a look at one of the most important aspects of growing your digital commerce business – marketing retention.

You’ve spent time, money, and resources on attracting and converting shoppers.  Next up is engaging and retaining them – and turning them into your best marketing assets. The most successful customer marketing retention strategies focus on highly-targeted and personalized customer relationship-building tactics that foster deep loyalty, advocacy, and increased lifetime value.

Customer retention is all about keeping customers happy and keeping your brand top of mind through tactics such as email, loyalty programs, and personalization. There are many ways to do so, but the most successful retention marketing strategies involve leveraging data to identify where the shopper is in the customer journey and using those insights to create relevant marketing messages at key moments.

Guest Post by Greg Zakowicz, Senior Commerce Marketing Analyst, Oracle + Bronto

The best marketers never launch a campaign without measuring results. They use data to measure all aspects of the campaign and judge where improvements can be made. But not just any data will do.

When data is messy, incomplete or disconnected, you don’t get a clear picture of your performance. When your data is clean, and you apply it in smart ways, you get better at giving shoppers the omnichannel experience they want and retaining them as customers along the way.

The goal is a single metric: customer lifetime value (CLV), what many say is the most important key performance indicator for your acquisition marketing, retention marketing and advertising spend.

Here are steps you can take today to begin using data to improve CLV.

1. Look for data disconnects. Notice each point where you collect customer data, how you share it across your system, and where you apply it in your marketing campaigns. Prepare to address issues that cause disconnects in the gathering and sharing of data. For example, if you ask shoppers for an email address in your retail store at the point of sale (and if you don’t, you should!), merge that data into your digital order management system, and note the orders each shopper places through each channel.

2. Set goals for the next 18 months. Identify what you most want to achieve. Are you hoping to increase repeat buyers? Attract more customers like the ones you have? Offer products that will attract new customers? Customer acquisition often comes at the expense of the bottom line. Consider tactics that will maintain current revenue streams as you grow your customer base.

2. Inspect your marketing technology. Identify missing tools that would enable a clean and complete data set. Mid-market and enterprise retailers should have each of these components. And the more integrated they are, the better.

• Order management system.

• Product taxonomy, SKU data, cart behavior and all “orders to cash” processes.

• Content management system to create and manage landing pages, site content and SEO.

• Customer relationship management system.

• Commerce marketing automation.

• Data management platform.

• Analytics and tracking.

• Tag management.

• Content delivery network. For retailers with many SKUs, this is essential for speed and efficiency.

• Tools for paid search, display and retargeting. Native tools, such as Adwords, are good but a demand-side platform is better.

Creating your commerce marketing strategy can be daunting, and maintaining it takes time and effort. But if you are clear about your goals, and you use the right data to inform your next steps, you’re on the right track for success.