Achieving customer loyalty

With the proliferation of media channels, sales pathways, and the continuous erosion of traditional retailer hegemony, FMCG and CPG businesses are struggling to resolve how to sustain and grow market share. Their usual pathways are less impactful, and the perfect storm of rising prices, increased competition and diminishing customer loyalty have left many watching their once-reliable customer heartlands disappear.

But where other e-commerce initiatives have failed to gain traction, Portera is seeing trend-bucking success with its unique loyalty approach, driving mass repeat engagement with CPG shoppers. It is culminating in a huge growth in offline sales data, overlaid with rich insights into CVJ maximisation and CRM journeys.

The past decade has seen numerous businesses attempt to exploit the boom in e-commerce and D2C retail. But no matter how impressive the UX, or how immediate the fulfilment proposition for their solus e-stores, many businesses across many verticals have had painful departures from their D2C strategy. Consumers simply find aggregators, such as Amazon, BOL, or Carrefour, or new startups like Getir a more attractive proposition when buying their everyday groceries.

And as these new channels control the presentation of products in a way that is less open to people seeing them (even compared to tightly guarded store shelves), brands are seeing a rise in switch or category exit; and their ability to influence it is less than ever before.

Having sat in annual business planning meetings, at all levels and in many organisations, the following contradiction still remains baffling: businesses fully understand the value of repeat customers, but so little A&P priority is spent on maximising lifetime value. Our lived experience is that CRM, CVJ, and retention strategies are an after-thought; deemed too complicated, hard work or fiddly… especially when compared to shiny advertising and the promise of ‘new customer acquisition’.

But rethinking the never-ending pursuit of new customers acquisition, relying on a passive hope that the halo effect of these communications is all that’s needed to keep existing customers buying, is more pressing than ever.

The goal for all businesses should be to fully understand the annual spend in their verticals, calculate their share of that spend and then work to increase that through both acquisition and retention strategies.

And rethinking loyalty is one of the key ways that this can be achieved.

Historically, the concept of loyalty has been limited to discounts and collector schemes. In sectors like retail, leisure, travel, and tourism, such schemes abound, generally falling into the sea-of-same, offering ambiguous value, typically on incremental purchases. Most have little relevance in CPG or product-based businesses. Why? Because the value of the purchase is too low for consumers to care.

By harnessing a new approach, with new technology, Portera is blasting open the parameters.

Portera has been working with a market-leading CPG business to pioneer a new way to drive customer loyalty. It is predicated on achieving ‘ritual product engagement’ – unlocking the consumer motivation to engage with each and every product bought, no matter where it is bought, with little or no need to prove purchase.

This combination is game-changing in its ability to achieve mass reach and engagement, mass update, and mass data capture. For confidentiality reasons we can’t go into specifics but the commercial impacts are huge.

The net benefit is being able to map offline sales (which is the vast majority of sales) into the CRM database, and laying that against digital engagement and marketing activation. Sales + Marketing = Results, viewed with a clarity that until now has only been available to CPG companies with established points of sale.