How Does Loyalty Fine-tune Audiences for Personalized Retail Media?

Adweek recently featured “7 Reasons Why Personalized Audiences Are Critical for Retail Media Networks’ from Achal Lathia, Product Manager, Audience Strategy at Albertsons Media Collective. 

In his post, Achal lists the seven reasons WHY, however, he doesn’t identify HOW you create these personal audiences. Building a loyalty program on a dedicated platform like Annex Cloud is the key to creating these personalized audiences.

Let’s look at how loyalty powers each of his reasons why creating personalized audiences is crucial for retail media networks’ success:

1. Enhanced customer experience

“By understanding individual preferences, you can create personalized recommendations, product offerings and promotions that resonate with each customer segment.”

Through carefully crafted loyalty programs, brands can truly understand their customers and tailor experiences that deliver a value-driven experience. A strong loyalty program continually incentivizes customer discovery and captures the data that drives personalized engagement.

2. Personalized advertising and improved iROAS

“Personalized advertising focuses on specific customer segments … driving higher click-through and conversion rates. This leads to improved iROAS.”

In fact, our Loyalty Experience Platform™ gathers deep customer data from non-transactional as well as transactional sources and drives highly advanced customer segmentation. These segments allow brand ad spends to be highly targeted with higher engagement and attribution.

3. Data-driven decision making

“From inventory management and pricing strategies to product assortment and marketing campaigns, personalized audience data serves as a valuable resource for strategic planning and optimization.”

Loyalty has emerged as the top mechanism for collecting customer data. Merge this unique data with your other retail data through integration with the loyalty platform, exporting to BI tools or passing to a data clean room. Loyalty data adds immense value by informing all messaging and decision-making. That cohesion in communication better directs all planning and helps optimize in the moment.

4. Customer segmentation and personalized offers

“For instance, high-value customers may receive exclusive discounts or loyalty rewards, while first-time buyers may receive incentives to encourage repeat purchases.”

Loyalty marketing is all about incentivizing customers to act and reward those actions. Segments are easily identifiable based upon where your customer is in their own journey. You determine the reward for them to act and rewards aren’t limited to discounts.

5. Cross-selling and upselling opportunities

“Enhanced audience segmentation improves the shopping experience for customers by showcasing relevant and valuable products.”

Accordingly, when you merge transactions with loyalty data, your ads can have high relevance. By joining your loyalty program, your customers have given permission to ask them direct questions about their preferences and interests. Imagine selling ads for products that customers have said they want.

6. Long-term customer relationship development

“Personalized audiences foster loyalty by consistently delivering relevant and valuable content to customers.”

Personalization and relevance are expected by customers across all touchpoints, especially in advertising. Without it, ads are just more noise, and this is why brands are looking for retail media to deliver better KPIs. Building relationships is a basic goal of loyalty programs and why brands think retail media can take things to the next level.

7. Competitive advantage

“By offering a superior and more tailored shopping experience and meeting customers’ expectations and preferences, you can gain a competitive edge … ”

With that in mind, we believe that a loyalty program is the best differentiator because of its ability to enable personalized experiences. Your competitors can offer similar products and promotions but the brands that win in retail media mine loyalty data to ensure they always have an edge, with this sale and those that follow.

Mr. Lathia is in an exciting, high-growth market with Albertsons retail media network. He sees, like we do in loyalty, that customer-centricity isn’t just important, it’s critical to success. We see innovative synergies at the intersection of loyalty and retail media.

You might also enjoy this short video on how loyalty enhances your retail media efforts.

Loyalty and retail media—a powerful combination

Annex Cloud’s SaaS-based loyalty solution allows brands to keep up with changing consumer preferences, collecting robust data they can use to serve up relevant ads and meaningful experiences. Let’s talk about how loyalty data can help you boost your revenue, profitability and competitive advantage.