From Shopper to Brand Advocate: The Ultimate Loyalty Guide
- Jessica Barret
- Apr 12, 2024
- 4 min read
Updated: Sep 18, 2024
This blog discusses how brands should navigate the buyer journey and turn consumers into brand advocates. Nowadays brands must make their products available to consumers whenever and wherever they're ready to buy in order to survive. Prominent companies are addressing this by implementing tactics aimed at transforming consumers into enduring promoters of their products. This blog is structured as follows:-
Customer loyalty is definitely can oxymoron. For any typical brand, for every 100 customers they acquire, a year later only 12% of those shoppers come back and continue to buy from those brands. The other 88% of customers churn. Meaning over that time horizon they do not come back and buy from that brand. If you double click in those 88% of customers who leave your brand, we get an insight that there are two main kinds of churn.
The first cohort is the churned exit category. It means they do not shop from the brand as well as they have stopped shopping from that category too. They have moved to other categories. They are spending their share of wallet elsewhere.
The group in the middle is the most interesting cohort, the churned switched brands. It is the biggest opportunity for growth for most brands. 51% of customers churn away from your brand but they do stay in that category. Basically they have started buying from competitors.
This behaviour is an indication of economic activity for the brand, since these customers are familiar with the brand, are still buying in category and the brand has already spent money to acquire them. Even the worlds top brands churn 50% of their customers.
Why is Retention So Challenging?
There are 3 reasons for the challenges experienced in retention.
Firstly, consumer brands and manufacturers are getting squeezed from all sides. Competition is accelerating at an enourmous scale. There are half a million sellers on Amazon itself.
Another consideration is acquiring new customers. The economics is all over. It is getting difficult to gain organic traffic as there is less placements. With the emergence of retail media, every single section is an ad and very few placements are for organic.
Finally, it is increasing more expensive to buy traffic. So your CPC rates, your clicks are going up. Lastly not every brand is successful. What 2023 showed us is that majority brands have declining sales.
Focussing on Top - Down Awareness
For majority of brands, their marketing funnel looks like this. New and legacy brands feel, if they drive awareness, they will drive everything else. But there is a fundamental break in that retention. Moving from purchase to retention is missing.
"The reality is that now shopper journey is unique, evolving and dynamic"
We thereby advocate, you flip the marketing funnel
Instead of awareness, once you have acquisition you move to affinity, then attachment and then finally advocacy. The biggest fallacy of most brands is to think, that if a customer buys their product once, that customer is retained. This stage of consumer journey is called brand affinity. It means that the consumers somewhat likes the current brand but has potential of moving to another brand. (for factors such as price point, product unavailability).
If a brand has affinity, they might be at a risk of losing consumers. Then comes the attachment stage. Consumers at this stage are extremely happy with the brand and their experience. These consumers feel valued by the brand.
Finally comes the pinnacle. What every brand must aspire to is brand advocacy. On a survey we conducted, for one of our clients, we found that after leaving a four star or five star reviews, consumers increase their orders by 89%. Hence we are advocating for a different view of buyers journey.
The following metrics were pulled from Edge Shopper Analytics software. It is a dataset where we have access to over 1 million consumers who participate. For each participant we have 3 to 8 years of purchase history which spans across retailers and across channels. We are tracking a million products/SKUs. So we have quite a catalogue which provides us the ability to understand nuances of every product which the consumers are engaging with and purchasing.
Brand Search = Brand Awareness but Unbranded Search = Opportunity
Influencers are the new competitors. They launch their own products which tends to compete with behemoth brands. And influencers mostly capture market growth
by engaging with their followers. So the traffic they get is mostly organic unpaid traffic.
Optimise the Shopper Conversion Flow
There are different ways in which you can take action on this type of data. It starts with ad targeting. See what your consumers are searching for, what products are they buying before they switch into your brand, then you can refine your ad targeting strategy pretty dramatically.
Then comes the ad creative. Connect with the end consumer and understand what images resonate with them, what photography, what videos, what type of headline messages are gonna drive the best click or conversion rate
Next is all the elements that fit within your product detail pages. Everything from photos, videos, bullet points and description. Everything you do on your landing page will enable someone to “Add-To-Cart” or bounce.
The most cutting edge technology for brands today is to create every piece of content with your target audience. Lastly there is checkout. To optimize your conversion rate you want to deliver rewards & promotions.
"Last but not the least is your ability to measure attribution on platforms"
We usually see upto a 30% boast in conversion rate, if a brand can really personalise the content on the landing page
Targeting a new generation of customers is challenging, but you don’t need to do it alone. Quest Digital offers a full suite of tools such as Atlas Shopper Analytics which will aid brands to gain an omniscient perspective into their customers buying history, scale review collection and syndication and rewards management.
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