Let’s start with what we know.
Acquiring new customers is hard. You need an offer a prospect finds compelling enough to convert.
Retaining customers is even harder. You need to re-engage them with “value exchanges” that feel meaningful and relevant at every touchpoint.
Personalized marketing can drive conversions and loyalty, but personalization requires accurate and actionable data–and that’s not easy to come by.
The challenge is twofold: How do you trigger a conversion that also gives you the data you need to create a deeper customer relationship? And how do you easily leverage that data across all your marketing platforms and programs?
The answer is to use an Audience Data Platform (ADP)—an end-to-end solution that helps you:
- Engage high-value customers.
- Collect permissioned data when you convert them.
- Use that data to drive revenue and loyalty.
Here are seven ways an ADP can supercharge all your marketing efforts.
1. Create Compelling Offers that Engage Key Customers
The most effective campaigns target high-value audiences with offers that make them feel personally rewarded.
An ADP enables you and your partner brands to target hundreds of audiences. This includes broad swaths of consumers you want to engage, like students, educators, and healthcare workers, as well as niche audiences that particularly fit your brand, like veterinarians would to a pet store, or a football fan club would to a sportswear company.
And with an ADP, you can deliver exclusive offers that make customers feel truly valued. Imagine how compelling it would be for a teacher to receive an exclusive discount on school supplies, or a healthcare worker to get exclusive, free access to a stress-reducing meditation app. That’s personalization at its best.
2. Revolutionize How You Reach Prospects
A great offer that doesn’t reach its intended audience is like a love letter mailed to the wrong address.
Offers delivered by an ADP reach the right customers because customers are searching for them. More than 80% of consumers check to see if a brand offers their group an exclusive deal before making a purchase.
And you can promote the offers in channels you know your audience frequents. Think on-campus events for students, educational blogs for teachers, or veteran-focused websites for service members.
With an ADP, you can also expose your offer to verified customers of:
- Complementary or adjacent brands.
- Other companies in your brand family.
- Companies you have established partnerships with.
And because audience members are often deeply connected, they can quickly make your offer go viral. More than 95% of consumers who belong to key audience networks will share an offer with others who are eligible for it.
Case in point: before SONIC launched its teacher offer, it tested the process by having an employee share the offer with a few friends. Within two days, the company had verified thousands of teachers—all from word of mouth.
3. Streamline Conversions
Prospects will be more likely to redeem your offer if the process is frictionless—and respects their privacy.
An ADP can instantly verify customers by collecting only basic information they’re willing to share, like an email address and birthdate. And it verifies customers as a seamless step in your purchase process, whether they are shopping online, in store, or on your mobile app.
Other verification methods lower conversions by asking prospects for sensitive personal information and making them leave your website and create a separate account to get verified. Imagine asking a Gen Z student for their social security number, sending them to a marketplace, and adding six clicks to get verified. There aren’t a lot of offers that would survive that UX.
4. Verify Customers and Their Data
To protect your margins, you need to ensure that only eligible customers can redeem your exclusive offer. And for the data you collect to be useful, it has to be accurate.
An ADP uses multiple authoritative data sources to verify a customer’s identity—and the accuracy of their data—before letting them redeem it. That drives better results by giving you the confidence you need to broadly promote your offer, which an ADP makes easy by verifying customers globally.
Also, an ADP enables you to own the brand relationship by giving you exclusive rights to your customers’ data. Other verification methods use your customers’ data to promote other brands—including your competitors—which makes it harder for you to nurture loyalty to your company.
Best of all, an ADP enables you to nurture everyone who tries to to get verified by flagging ineligible customers so you can send them a consolation offer.
5. Append Data to Your Customer Profiles
For good data to work, you have to harness its power. This can be difficult if your data is siloed or spread across a large martech stack, which is likely the case. A survey conducted by Forrester revealed that 66% of companies are using 16+ martech platforms.
With an Audience Data Platform, you can permanently append the permissioned data you collect to a wide range of martech and adtech platforms. And you can add unique questions to your verification form to collect attributes you want to leverage, like a student’s major or graduation date.
Appending verified data like this enriches your customer profiles and lets you immediately leverage the newfound insight in all your re-engagement campaigns.
6. Give Your Loyalty Programs Greater Power
An ADP strengthens your loyalty program by letting you integrate the offer verification process into it. Your exclusive offer can spur enrollment in your program, and the permissioned data you collect enables you to personalize the perks you offer.
An ADP can boost engagement even further by linking your loyalty program to the loyalty program of brand partners. Now you can create shared incentives and redemption opportunities that offer your customers more value.
7. Harness Customer Data to Drive CLV
Helping you create truly personalized marketing is where an ADP outshines all other platforms. Knowing a customer is a member of an audience gives you meaningful insight you can leverage throughout their life.
For example, once you verify that a customer is a student, you can send them a free gift during finals and a special discount to celebrate spring break. Then you can greet them in the fall with a back-to-school offer, honor them when they graduate, and congratulate them when their alma mater’s basketball team wins a big game
This kind of personalization is extremely effective because it’s truly personal. You show customers that you understand their lives and support their whole being.
For example, you can honor service members on Veterans Day, reward teachers during National Teacher Appreciation week, and support everyday heroes during stressful times, like when fire fighters are battling wild fires and healthcare workers are struggling to contain an outbreak.
With an ADP, the opportunities to create personalized marketing are endless, which means your potential for acquiring and retaining customers is, too.
Turn One Transaction into a Lifetime of Loyalty
Hundreds of global brands are using SheerID’s ADP to win new customers and collect permissioned data to nurture lifelong loyalty. Visit our website to read about their success and learn more about our ADP.