Elevate Your Customer Loyalty Strategy with Data-Driven Advocacy

Read time: 5 mins

Getting customers to feel a sense of belonging and genuine loyalty is a goal all brands strive for, yet achieving it requires a strategic and nuanced approach. Creating strong and durable customer loyalty within your base requires an unparalleled customer experience that marks you out from the crowd and fosters a deep connection with your brand.

To meet the required CX standard, your brand needs to be consistently intuitive, personalised and enjoyable at every touchpoint and interaction. 

This in turn requires intelligent use of data. 

The power of customer advocacy, and the secret to its ability to boost loyalty, lies in its use of data to understand the sentiments and motivations that lie behind buying decisions, revealing much more about the loyalties of your customers than purchase data alone. 

Today, we'll guide you through the essential ways to use advocacy data points to elevate your customer loyalty-building endeavours.

Top capabilities to build loyalty

So what are the core capabilities for building robust customer loyalty? Mention Me has created the world’s first Customer Advocacy Intelligence Platform to help you identify and nurture your brand’s biggest fans, turning passive customers into active promoters of your brand. 

The platform has several capabilities that help you build loyalty, giving you insights into your customers' receptiveness towards your brand and providing the tools to boost loyalty and engagement.

Loyalty programme integration

Integrating advocacy data with your established loyalty programme makes it more intelligent, responsive and personalised. It deepens engagement, making customers feel more connected to your brand and less inclined to look elsewhere.

It allows you to more accurately track customer loyalty, too. For example, you can reward customers with loyalty points when they take advocacy actions (like making referrals or leaving positive reviews). You can then track the redemption of these loyalty points and gain insights into the effectiveness of your program in building loyalty. It’s a win-win: You get more powerful insights at the same time as creating a more interactive and rewarding experience.

Sentiment Analysis

Because customer loyalty is so much more than a loyalty programme, you need to be ambitious and imaginative when it comes to building loyalty with your customers. 

This is where an expanded view of customer data — beyond simple purchasing decisions — gives you the real competitive edge when it comes to building your customer experience and brand loyalty.

Sentiment Analysis works by analysing referral and review data, producing insights into customer perceptions and motivations and enabling you to fine-tune your loyalty strategies and address areas for improvement.

Network Insights

With Network Insights, the platform offers you an X-ray view straight into the root system that’s feeding your brand’s organic growth. It provides a visual representation of your customers’ referrals, allowing you to see at a glance those clusters of loyal customers who power your business forward without the need for advertising and marketing spend.

Not all of your loyal customers will be active promoters. Some will be happy to buy and appreciate your products in silence. Others will be only too happy to promote you to others. With Network Insights, you can see the patterns and commonalities and understand what’s motivating those customers who do promote you. 

Use these learnings to deploy experiences, offers and messaging that will increase the activity level of these loyal customers and thereby increase the organic growth of your business. 

Network Insights is doubly helpful for building loyalty: You consolidate loyalty within your existing customer base, and, because your new referred customers are hearing about you from a trusted source, you also bake loyalty into your relationship with your new customers. 

ECR tracking

Extended Customer Revenue (ECR) tells you the overall value of your customers’ spending and referrals, giving you insights into which customers are most actively promoting your brand through referrals. 

Your most loyal customers aren't always the biggest spenders. ECR data allows you to quantify the value of your customers’ actions that don’t directly result in a purchase but are nonetheless essential to sustainable growth. 

ERC data provides an invaluable guide when developing a marketing and CX strategy aimed at increasing loyalty.  

Predicted ECR (Extended Customer Revenue)

Once you’ve started to use ECR data as part of your loyalty strategy, take it one step further and incorporate Predictive ECR to identify how much value your customers will generate for your business through their advocacy in 12 months’ time. 

It means you can automate decisions about the next best action to take with each customer, saving some customers from churning and nudging others along the loyalty journey from passive repeat customers to active promoters of your brand. 

Use advocacy data to inform customer segments

Using advocacy data to build customer segments allows you to create more personalised campaigns.

Start by categorising your customers based on their advocacy behaviours. Are they active promoters, silent appreciators, or somewhere in between? Use this segmentation to tailor your communications, rewards, and engagement strategies, ensuring they align with each group's level of enthusiasm and loyalty to your brand.

For example, you could include high-ECR value customers in your VIP segment, even if they’re not one of your highest-spending customers. At the other end of the scale, you can exclude advocates from your lapsed customer segment. 

Mention Me’s data-driven approach to customer loyalty

By embracing a data-driven approach to customer advocacy, you can transform the way you build and sustain loyalty. The Customer Advocacy Intelligence Platform allows you to transcend traditional loyalty programs and tap into the genuine enthusiasm customers have for your brand. By understanding how your customers feel, you can more meaningfully engage with them, elevating your loyalty strategy and forging stronger, more enduring connections with your customers.