Customer Retention Strategies to Increase Lifetime Value

These data-driven retention strategies will keep your best customers coming back to your business for more.
Updated on April 4, 2024

The relationship a business develops with their first-time customers can be extremely powerful. Marketers who transform people who are new to their business into lifetime buyers can make a huge impact on a company’s long-term growth and success.  

Here’s how it works: When a first-time buyer makes a purchase from your business for a second time, their likelihood of making yet another purchase increases by 95%. From there, every time they make another purchase, their likelihood to buy again continues to increase. As a result, investing in your new customers ultimately increases customer lifetime value by up to 130%. ¹  

You worked hard to acquire new customers. Now that they’ve made their first purchase with your business, it’s essential to re-engage them with retention tactics that will turn them into long-term, active shoppers.  

However, retention isn’t a one-size-fits-all play. With the demand for customer personalization at an all-time high,² marketers must create highly relevant and customized shopping experiences to foster customer loyalty. These personalization-driven retention strategies will help transform your existing customer base into loyal, lifetime shoppers.  

Know who your high-value customers are 

Leverage high-quality shopper data to find and reconnect with previous customers that are likely to shop from your business again. By identifying who your high-value customers are and developing a deep understanding of their interests, you’ll know how to make your company stay top of mind so they come back to you again and again. 

Criteo brings together three types of shopper data — identifier, product, and engagement — analyzing it with advanced AI to  help businesses better understand what shoppers want. 

Differentiate your messaging based on segmentations 

For a hyper-focused audience approach, marketers can tap into data to reconnect with targeted segmentations such as abandoned cart customers, seasonal customers, and high-order-value customers. Using first-party data insights, Criteo enables marketers to develop different strategies for different audiences, allowing them to address each with unique messaging and experiences. 

Interested in a real-world success story? The apparel brand Jockey launched a predictive audiences campaign with Criteo to re-engage audience segments with a high predictive lifetime value.  

Mark Mraz, Jockey’s Senior Director of Marketplace, SEM & Finance, shared, “Our goal was to stop going after a huge swath of people and instead get more specific in the terms we bid on and the customers we retarget to allocate spending to our best customers and those who are most likely to buy.”  

The partnership resulted in an impressive 109% return-on-ad-spend increase within two months and a 30% year-over-year revenue increase. 

Drive product discovery with personalized ads 

Re-engage existing customers with tailored ads for the products you know they’ll love. Address your customers’ interests and needs based on a continuously refreshed understanding of what they’re most likely to buy.  

Criteo can help you determine the products that your customers are most interested in by tapping into our First Party Media Network, part of the largest commerce dataset on the open internet. While you already know what your customers bought from you in the past, Criteo understands your customers beyond your business: Our machine learning capabilities can identify the products that your customers are buying from competitors and what they’re browsing for online. With this information, marketers can identify opportunities to upsell/cross-sell specific products that match those customers’ interests. 

Create a seamless experience 

Reach shoppers throughout the entire customer journey with personalized experiences that support how customers prefer to browse and shop – whether they’re scrolling through social media, reading an article on their favorite publication’s website, comparing products on a retailer site, or browsing the open internet. 

Across omnichannel experiences, marketers can optimize how they connect with customers by nurturing their shopper journeys from consideration to conversion. Criteo’s AI Engine, which analyzes 120+ shopper intent signals from 35B daily browsing and buying events, uses real-time decisioning to predict the best time to re-engage each customer. Our best-in-class AI then delivers hyper-relevant ads that are powered in real-time to drive awareness strategies before they purchase. Then, our AI Engine can re-engage them again when they’re ready to buy. 

To further drive customer loyalty and stay top of mind, marketers can also remind customers what they’re missing by delivering ads about special deals and hyper-relevant loyalty offers throughout the customer journey. 

Drive value everyday 

Marketers who want to grow an ongoing relationship with their customers beyond a single sale must invest in delivering deeply personalized, customer-centric experiences. Backed by the largest commerce dataset on the open internet and best-in-class AI, Criteo makes it easy to reconnect with your customers, so you can stay top of mind and keep them coming back for more. 

Ready to re-engage your customers to grow your business?

Learn more here and get started with a Criteo expert. 

¹ Bluecore, The One and Done Buyer Problem 

²Forrester, Why Marketers Can’t Ignore Data Quality

Elizabeth Kim

Elizabeth Kim is a Global Content Strategist captivated by technology, culture, and consumer behavior. Before joining the world of Ad Tech, Elizabeth crafted brand and content strategies at agencies for clients spanning startups to household name giants. Outside of work, Elizabeth finds creative ...

Global Content Strategist
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