Deploy AI to Build Connections that Deliver Lasting Customer Loyalty

As brands look to improve the overall customer experience, it’s important for them to consider initiatives that foster and sustain emotional relationships with their customers. Today, customers want to interact with brands beyond just transactions. Marketers need to build emotional loyalty so customers want to stick around and become their superfans.

Brands must seize the opportunity to create connections along every touchpoint throughout the customer journey. According to a 2019 Deloitte Digital report, as the customer relationship progresses, making rational considerations become less and less important to consumers and emotional attachment takes over. Interestingly, shared values are not the driving force behind emotional relationships, as the report found that only 3% of consumers would recommend a company based on their values or principles, whereas 44% of consumers would recommend it based on emotional criteria.

Tap Into the Right Data

Marketers need the ability to easily access quality data to begin understanding their customers’ emotions and to help them keep emotional components front and center when executing their loyalty strategy. Customer behavior data along with channel preference data provide the context a marketer needs to deliver personalized offers and experiences that will strike an emotional chord and encourage positive customer engagement. 

To further nurture emotional loyalty, brands need to be able to take a quantifiable approach to seeing the total value they deliver to a customer during in-store and online interactions. This occurs by engaging customers outside of the buying cycle through surveys and quizzes, as well as encouraging and responding to reviews, referrals, and social posts. Brands need to reward these non-transactions because they demonstrate valuable engagement and are an opportunity to gather valuable data.

Apply AI to Make Marketing Easier

To make this part of their job easier, marketers need the ability to apply AI algorithms to those responses and turn them into actionable insights. Those insights can help drive customer segmentation along with AI-provided offers to deliver effective and efficient customer journey campaigns. With AI-assistance a brand is better positioned to optimize every interaction and successfully deliver personalization at scale to make the emotional bond more resilient.  

Lastly, creating emotional loyalty means moving beyond transactional rewards. Customer data insights can again lend a hand to expand reward offerings that create emotional attachment through feelings of exclusivity or with experiential promotions such as a free cooking class or access to a special store event. Delivering relevant messaging and individualized offers and experiences help a brand establish that they know their customers better than their competition.   

Learn more about Punchh’s data-driven solutions, including the deep sentiment analysis feature that turns customer reviews into quantifiable metrics that help brands grow CLV.