Milestones offer a great marketing opportunity for you to commemorate your customer’s association with your organization.
Anniversaries mark an additional year of a customer’s patronage with your brand. Memorializing such achievements enables you to strengthen your bond with your valued customers.
However, birthdays and anniversaries happen only once a year; if you’re only interacting with your customers only on such dates, you’re not getting the return-on-investment you want.
Brands can go a step further with milestones to get your customer’s attention.
Let’s find out how.
The relationship between identity and customer milestones
If your brand wants to achieve the ROI you want from a milestone campaign, you have to understand how customers form their identity.
Identity refers to the fundamental values that dictate the choices made by a customer. It reflects who they are and what they value.
Since these choices change with time, it’s not practical to send once-a-year birthday or anniversary wishes to your customers when they have already moved on from your brand, sending your milestone message into the trash.
However, to create an opportunity for your business, you have to take some additional steps:
Creating a loyalty or rewards program
For instance, you can create a multi-tier rewards program in which different tiers are assigned based on an individual’s purchase activity.
Once a customer reaches a new tier, celebrate the milestone by:
- Affirming a customer’s VIP status
- Sending a greeting email
- Informing your customers about new perks and benefits they have unlocked
Activity tracking
Another way you can celebrate your customer milestones is by tracking your customer activity over a year.
For instance, you can analyze an individual’s profile and purchase history. Based on the analysis, you can create specific product recommendations, affirming your customer’s likes and interests.
Essential factors for building a milestone campaign
To create a successful milestone campaign, you need to consider the following three critical points:
A milestone to celebrate
Before building a milestone campaign, you need to figure out what your customers like to celebrate.
Fortunately, you have many options to start.
For instance, the one thing that most people enjoy is their birthday, and it’s not much of a stretch to give your customer an offer as a birthday gift.
Or, you can also celebrate a business milestone – like five years of association with a customer and sending them an exclusive discount or offer.
Otherwise, if your brand chooses to track an activity, you’ll have to establish what the tiers look like – and decide what information you will present in your milestone email.
Data to support a milestone
Once you’ve finalized the milestone your brand wants to focus on, make sure you have the required data to support it.
While it may be easy to keep track of your contacts’ birthdays or anniversaries when the numbers are limited – it gets tricky when your contact list has thousands of names.
So what’s the solution?
It’s automation.
By automating your messaging, you can cater to hundreds and thousands of customers without swamping your email teams to send birthday cards all the time.
But for automation, you first need relevant customer data. You can gather it in two ways: voluntarily or by tracking customer behavior.
For voluntary data, you have to offer gifts to your customers in exchange for information. For instance, when a user visits your website, a pop-up shall appear, which assures a guaranteed gift if the individual fills out the form.
Alternatively, you have to collect customer data by tracking their activities such as – first purchase, first time using a payment method, first product rating, and more.
By collecting data through either of the ways, you can generate relevant information and create a milestone to configure your automated messaging app accordingly.
Special offers
Just by wishing your customers “Happy Birthday” won’t get you far; you have to get a step ahead and send them a gift on their special day.
However, gifts can sometimes backfire if they aren’t personalized or person-specific. To make sure your customer rewards have maximum impact, here are two crucial considerations:
- Meaningful and unexpected. Your customers will appreciate a gift if it’s meaningful and relevant to them. If you can add an element of surprise as well, there are high chances of converting your loyal customers into brand advocates.
- Well-researched. Sometimes you have to carry out extensive research on your customers to understand their interests, likes, and dislikes. Otherwise, generic gifts can affect your brand value.
How NextBee manages milestones with special offers for valued customers?
NextBee uses its flexible rule configurator engine to detect your engagement standards.
By tracking all of your engagement metrics and mapping them into objective scores, the rule configurator engine creates a specific customer rewards program.
It also automates personalized milestone rewards to your customers based on their purchase history using machine learning.
By creating a milestone structure, you can quickly motivate your customers to purchase more frequently and level up to unlock more rewards in the next milestone.
Bottomline
Acknowledging your customers and showing appreciation isn’t just a promotional concept; it’s about showing your gratitude towards them.
Showing that you value the time and effort of your audience is the best way you can build lasting relationships.
Don’t forget one bad experience can not only affect your relationship with a particular customer but also create a negative influence on your potential buyers.
