More than ever, customers expect experiences that are relevant and personalized; they want to feel understood by brands in each and every engagement across all touch points. At the same time, they are inundated with a plethora of choices in an increasingly competitive macroeconomic environment. And with more brands offering streamlined and personalized experiences, consumers’ expectations will continue to grow. A seamless, personalized experience that surprises and delights — as well as provides value in everyday lives — is key to meeting those expectations. To rise above the competition, brands need the right tools to deliver real-time, relevant experiences that stand out and rise above the noise.

With more resources allocated to marketing teams, delivering these experiences is possible. Perhaps surprisingly, 83% of global companies recently said their marketing budgets will increase in the next 12 months, compared to only 60% in 2020. With this boost, teams are focusing on customer retention — a task proving to be a challenge given today’s overload of choices for customers as well as  an increased competitive landscape.

Customer retention is key — but where to start?

Consumers are careful to spend money — and when they do, they expect more from the brands they’re purchasing from. By keeping existing customers happy, marketers can better position themselves to unlock short-term success and long-term growth. Notably in 2023, 36% more brands are increasing their focus on retention efforts than in 2020.  With acquisition costs at unsustainable highs and persistent economic instability, brands need to think about strategies that will make their customers stick around and keep engaging for a longer period of time. Higher return activities like lifecycle optimization and retention are the name of today’s marketing game.

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Too much data is overwhelming

Currently, marketing teams feel overwhelmed by the sheer volume of customer data and lack the capacity to transform customer knowledge into actionable insights. Understanding user insights and leveraging data to smartly segment your audiences is one of the first steps to drive customer retention and brand loyalty. In fact, 80% of companies collect too much data, resulting in information rendered ineffective and wasted. It’s not just about collecting data, but using the data to create meaningful conversation with customers. Ultimately, if you are not great at collecting, analyzing and managing data, this process increases costs, creates privacy risks, and causes leadership to question how effective marketing programs really are.

Here are three ways to transform your data into actionable insights:

1. Build closer relationships with data teams

Transforming the amount of available data into improved customer engagement and retention starts with investing in marketing teams who can successfully coordinate with data teams. Enabling professional collaborations between these two groups will serve to build out customer engagement tools that bolster loyalty and retention. Without alignment across marketing, product, and data teams, brands suffer from data silos that introduce opportunities for errors, inhibit real-time communication, and create disjointed workflows.

2. Make intentional choices about what data to collect

Marketers need to be more intentional about what data they collect, mapping their collection strategy to concrete use cases, metrics, and goals — alongside their data teams. Thirty-six percent of marketers ranked collecting, integrating, managing, and accessing data as their top challenge associated with customer engagement. Given the vast quantity of data available today, intentionality will be crucial in transforming information into action.

3. Implement cross-channel strategies

As consumers today engage across multiple channels, a cross-channel approach can result in a tripled increase in average purchases per user with each additional messaging channel used, thus building a customer base eager to come back, again and again. Cross-channel approaches also unlock an ability to meet customers wherever they are in their journey, which supports a more relevant, valued experience. By combining both in-product channels like in-app messages and out-of-product channels like emails, brands can successfully drive higher retention and monetization rates.

To be effective in your cross-channel engagement, data scientists and marketing teams should align internally to strategize and meet customers at the right channel, at the right time. Customers who receive cross-channel messages have shown a 90-day retention rate that’s 55% higher than users who receive messages in one channel.

Finally, 99% of marketers say they will shift their customer engagement strategies in the next 12 months, including using methods to prioritize personalized, human messaging to meaningfully connect with customers. This can take many forms including offering helpful advice based on previous customer complaints or sending promotional commercial offers based on past purchase history. Cross-channel marketing offers customer engagement tools that feel personalized and efficient, helping to establish strong brand loyalty and develop personalized customer relationships.

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Focusing on retention starts with mending internal relationships

During volatile economic times, strengthening customer relationships ultimately comes down to transforming data into actionable insights — which starts with coordinating efforts between data scientists and marketing teams. In this regard, customer engagement requires careful and comprehensive collaboration to foster interdisciplinary brand strategies. Together, these groups can build effective cross-channel customer engagement strategies that bolster brand loyalty and breed customer retention using their respective sets of skills.

We know today’s customer wants a personalized and seamless experience when they interact with a brand, and it’s a marketing leader’s job to ensure this is achieved through effective data collection and management, a focused approach to interdisciplinary relationships, and an implementation of cross-channel marketing strategies.