Customers can now compare product alternatives with a single click. However, the endless options often make shoppers non-committal, difficult to please, and even harder to keep.
With steep competition and ever-rising customer expectations, retaining an e-commerce shopper’s attention now demands more than discounts and flashy ads. It requires a white-glove, data-driven approach to engagement.
The most effective solution is customer marketing. When paired with the right marketing automation software, brands can deliver personalized experiences at scale, boost retention, and turn casual buyers into loyal advocates.
A customer marketing strategy is a retention-focused approach that strengthens relationships with existing customers to increase loyalty, drive repeat purchases, and inspire brand advocacy. Its ultimate goal is to turn satisfied buyers into engaged customers who actively promote the brand to others.
This guide explores customer marketing, why it matters for your brand’s long-term growth, and how to build a strategy that transforms everyday shoppers into loyal superfans.
As cost-per-acquisition (CPA) continues to climb, keeping customers engaged is more profitable than constantly chasing new ones. When those superfans become advocates, they can organically drive acquisition through word-of-mouth and social influence.
But brand advocates don’t just appear; they’re cultivated. Let’s explore how a well-rounded customer marketing strategy, supported by marketing automation software, can nurture engagement, build loyalty, and create a sustainable engine for growth throughout the customer journey.
Traditional marketing focuses heavily on acquisition, generating leads, running campaigns, and converting prospects into first-time buyers. While this approach drives new traffic, it often stops short after the sale.
Customer marketing, on the other hand, is all about what happens next. It prioritizes retention, loyalty, and advocacy, ensuring that existing customers stay engaged and connected to your brand. Instead of one-time transactions, the focus is on nurturing long-term relationships that increase customer lifetime value (CLV).
Here’s a quick comparison:
| Traditional marketing | Customer marketing |
| Targets prospects | Targets existing customers |
| Focuses on the first purchase | Focuses on repeat purchases |
| Short-term campaign focus | Long-term relationship focus |
| Measures ROI on immediate sales | Measures ROI on lifetime value & loyalty |
| Channels: Ads, SEO, social media | Channels: Email, loyalty programs, referrals, reviews |
Your customer marketing strategy should engage the customer at all major touchpoints, improve the shopping experience, and campaign for brand loyalty to fuel long-term growth and profitability for your e-commerce brand.
Let’s dive into five strategies that can help achieve this:
Review programs and user-generated content (UGC) are far from novel ideas in e-commerce. Yet many brands overlook the importance of a well-executed review program and its impact on engagement and long-term growth.
Online shoppers commonly make purchases without physically inspecting the product. They rely on just a photo and description, placing a high level of trust that the brand and product will meet expectations. A review program can help ease this uncertainty by offering social proof.
Rather than taking the brand’s word for it, a review program allows customers insights into how former or existing customers feel about their purchases and interactions with the brand. Reviews also create a sense of community in that customers can relate to each other on their preferences, opinions, and feedback on the brand or product.
Customers who have a positive experience with your brand and their purchases are much more likely to recommend your brand to friends and family members. This is considered organic referrals or the highly coveted effects of word-of-mouth advertising. Brands can, however, try to create a similar effect through referral marketing.
Referral marketing allows brands to actively reach out to customers and ask for referrals in exchange for rewards, such as discounts or gifts. For instance, after a customer buys something, encourage them to refer a friend to redeem their reward. This not only increases repeat purchases but also helps bring in new customers.
To boost profitability, your brand needs to give customers a reason or incentive to level up their engagement. A loyalty program provides a clear and structured system that encourages and increases the frequency of their desired behaviors.
Source: Okendo
According to loyalty program e-commerce research, 72% of customers say they are willing to purchase from a brand more often if they are part of its loyalty program. Loyalty programs increase engagements, interactions, and purchases and bolster brand reputation by showing customers that their loyalty is appreciated.
Avoid cookie-cutter programs. Design one that truly resonates with your unique customer base.
A well-crafted loyalty program doesn’t just reward purchases; it fuels long-term engagement and advocacy.
Quizzes are an effective customer marketing tool that is often overlooked. While they might seem superfluous to the online shopping experience, quizzes can have profound impacts on conversion rates, brand reputation, product discovery, and the shopping journey as a whole.
They allow brands to give customers personalized product recommendations based on their answers to the quiz prompts, thereby tailoring the experience while guiding the customer through product discovery.
Here are some examples of interactive quiz questions:
Surveys are one of the most effective tools for identifying friction points, gathering zero-party data, and collecting direct customer feedback, all essential for refining the shopping experience and driving long-term growth.
By asking customers for their opinions, brands show that they value their audience’s perspective and are committed to continuous improvement. This builds trust, loyalty, and brand credibility while providing actionable insights for optimization.
Post-purchase surveys do more than collect answers; they strengthen customer relationships by demonstrating trust, mindfulness, and responsiveness. They also uncover valuable insights that improve the customer journey, gather zero-party data to power personalization, and provide context to analytics by revealing the why behind customer behaviors.
Every brand should consider implementing these three types of surveys:
While each customer marketing strategy can deliver great results on its own, combining them amplifies their impact. Here’s why integrating all five strategies leads to optimal success:
When your customer marketing tools - like reviews, loyalty programs, and quizzes - work together as part of a cohesive strategy, they tell a consistent story. This repeated messaging builds trust and awareness of the most important elements of the brand’s message.
Consolidation also helps save time and money by making operations more efficient, automatic, and simplified. Instead of working in and out of separate platforms, brands can work with one consolidated platform.
By having reviews, quizzes, surveys, referrals, and loyalty programs all exist in one place, you create a single source of truth for customer data. This unified data pool lets brands keep track of their customer profiles, reconcile data, improve accuracy, and analyze the customer base in a myriad of ways. With stronger analytics and improved accuracy, your brand can make better decisions.
Employing each of these strategies benefits the customer's shopping experience by comprehensively improving it. Each tool or strategy addresses a key point of the customer shopping journey and creates a focused and consistent message that puts the customer first.
With this enhanced and mindful customer experience, customers will have a better opinion of the brand and be much more likely to become loyal customers. Consistency, reliability, and putting the customer at the center of decision-making foster customer loyalty for long-term success.
The strength of your customer marketing program is measurable. Tracking the right KPIs helps you identify what’s working, where to invest more, and what needs refining.
| Metric | What it measure | Why it matters |
| Customer lifetime value (CLV) | Revenue from a customer over their entire relationship | Shows the long-term impact of retention efforts |
| Repeat purchase rate | % of customers who buy more than once | Indicates loyalty and satisfaction |
| Net promoter score (NPS) | Likely customers will recommend your brand | Gauges advocacy potential |
| Referral rate | % of new customers from referrals | Measures the success of advocacy programs |
| Review sentiment | Overall positivity of reviews | Reflects product and service quality |
| Engagement rate | Interaction with loyalty programs, email campaigns, or quizzes | Shows ongoing brand involvement |
Customer marketing strategies can look different for every brand. Check out these real brand success stories that highlight how different brands have used these strategies effectively.
The Beauty of Joseon is a skincare brand that recommends the full skincare routine to customers through a quiz. By asking about customers' concerns and preferences, the brand provides ideal product recommendations while also educating customers and enhancing product discovery.
This approach was especially effective for first-time customers and achieved an 8% conversion rate post-completion – more than double the sitewide conversion rate.
Source: Okendo
Dixxon, a specialty apparel company, introduced a tiered loyalty program to its customers. This allowed them to create an exclusive fourth tier for its repeat buyers and strategically enhance the rewards and perks in accordance with tier levels. Loyalty customers now make up to six purchases, whereas non-loyalty customers make up to two purchases on average.
Source: Okendo
Known for its artisanal soft pretzels and Belgian waffles, the food brand Eastern Standard Provisions wanted to understand its customers on a deeper level. They strove to improve the customer shopping experience and refine its marketing efforts.
With the help of surveys, Eastern Standard Provisions learned that 38% of first-touch customers came from paid social and that the “high quality ingredients” claim was key selling point in their ad messaging.
Source: Okendo
Love Wellness is a supplement brand that provides non-toxic, non-irritating wellness products focused on women’s health. It pursued a tech stack revamp and consolidated its reviews platform provider with its surveys provider. In that, it prioritized a speedy load time for its reviews widget and achieved a 100% increase in order-to-review rate. with its new integration.
Source: Okendo
The Collagen Co. is a collagen supplement brand that sought to create loyal customers through the use of a referral program. The brand allowed customers to receive a $25 credit for referring the brand to additional customers. After the launch of their referral program, The Collagen Co. achieved a 9.7% conversion rate and over 20 times ROI after the first 90 days of launching referrals.
Source: Okendo
Even well-intentioned customer marketing strategies can fall short if they’re poorly executed. Avoid these common pitfalls:
Avoiding these mistakes not only boosts retention but also protects your brand reputation.
Retention comes from creating consistent, personalized experiences that build trust and loyalty. Tools like loyalty programs, targeted email campaigns, reviews, and post-purchase engagement help keep customers coming back.
Acquisition is about attracting new customers through ads, content marketing, or promotions. Retention focuses on nurturing existing customers so they purchase more often, spend more, and recommend your brand to others.
By turning existing customers into advocates, customer marketing generates word-of-mouth referrals, which bring in new customers without the high cost of paid advertising.
personalization tailors messaging, offers, and product recommendations to each customer’s preferences and behavior, increasing engagement and purchase frequency.
Yes. Non-discount incentives like exclusive content, early access to products, and VIP experiences can be just as effective in driving loyalty.
A successful customer marketing strategy focuses on the customer above all else. Instead of seeking revenue growth or increased profits, customer marketing prioritizes the customer experience with the understanding that financial results will follow.
By using these five strategies together, your brand will build genuine customer relationships and create positive experiences that will build long-term loyalty, returning customers, brand advocacy, and sustained growth.
Ready to spend less on marketing? Learn how customer retention makes it possible!
Edited by Monishka Agrawal
This article was originally published in 2024. It has been updated with new information.
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