Discover how to use loyalty and review data to drive eCommerce growth. Learn four ways to integrate these strategies and boost revenue.
Loyalty and reviews are two integral parts of eCommerce marketing, but they’re often treated as separate strategies. While each can succeed on its own, combining them creates a powerful engine for customer engagement and revenue growth.
At a basic level, the two feed into each other: loyal customers are more likely to leave positive reviews, and positive reviews inspire more loyalty. But the real opportunity lies in connecting the data they generate. When loyalty and review insights are shared across your marketing stack, you gain a deeper understanding of your customers and more ways to keep them engaged.
Here are four practical ways to connect loyalty and review programs and turn customer insights into measurable growth.
Personalization is another integral part of eCommerce marketing, and it’s particularly important for your loyalty program. By providing a tailored experience for loyalty subscribers you can increase engagement, retention and customer lifetime value.
And what drives personalization? Data. Or more specifically in an age of increased privacy, zero-party data (data that is given willingly by the consumer).
You can gather a lot of this from your loyalty program itself - like demographic information, purchase behavior and reward redemption - but you can also collect zero-party data through review attributes.
Review attributes are additional questions you ask as part of a review request, and they’re incredibly useful here because you can design the questions you ask with your loyalty program in mind.
Say for example you’re a skin care brand. As part of a review request you ask the customer to specify their skin type - dry, oily, sensitive - you get the idea.
You can then share this data with an ESP like Klaviyo and segment customers by their skin type. If those customers are enrolled in your loyalty program you can then send them special offers and discounts on products suited to their specific needs.
It’s not just a clever use of data, it’s a growing necessity, with 52% of customers expecting personalized offers as standard.
When a customer signs up to your loyalty program, it creates a host of additional touch points. There are multiple emails you can send throughout the relationship, including
- Welcome emails
- Points balance updates
- Special offers
- Program anniversary emails
- Tier advancement emails
- Birthday wishes
Each of these is a chance to engage and incentivise a purchase. It’s also a chance to promote your products using reviews and user-generated content (UGC).
Take our personalized skin care offer again. The loyalty subscriber has a special offer on products ideal for their skin type, and each of the products displayed in the email has an average star rating and review count next to it.
Those stars offer social proof and prove the efficacy of each product, giving the subscriber another reason to click through in addition to their personalized loyalty offer.
As another use case, you could send a loyalty subscriber a birthday discount code and pull a dynamic gallery of shoppable UGC into the email for instant product discovery. And if you’ve followed tip one - segmenting your subscribers by specific attributes - you ensure the products displayed in those galleries are targeted to the individual.
Referred customers are highly valuable to your business. Mainly because they spend more often and in higher amounts. In fact, research shows a referred customer is typically 18% more loyal and has a 16% higher lifetime value than a non-referred customer - so it’s definitely worth rolling out a referral marketing campaign.
Of course the people most likely to recommend you to their family and friends are those most loyal to your brand - i.e. customers subscribed to your loyalty program. And they’re most open to making those referrals after having a positive experience themselves.
A 5* review is a clear indication that a customer is thinking of your brand in a very positive light. Using these reviews as a trigger for a referral campaign helps you tap into that sentiment at just the right time and grow your customer base through positive word of mouth.
Creating the ideal customer profile is hard work. Market research takes time and money, but if you don’t have any data to work from you’re essentially basing your advertising strategy on who you think your ideal customer is.
With loyalty and reviews however, all the data you need is at your fingertips.
Your loyalty data tells you all about your best customers. It gives you demographic information, insight into their interests and preferences, and reliable data on purchase behavior - how often they spend, how much they spend, and what they spend on.
If you’re collecting reviews from these loyal customers, you can also collect deeper insight through attributes. When you combine all this data, you’re left with highly detailed profiles of those customers with the highest lifetime value - and that means you can target more like them with your paid advertising.
Even better, if you use your loyalty program to encourage your best customers to submit visual UGC - like photo and video reviews - you can really build a picture of who they are and how they use your products. And that’s marketing dynamite.
All of the tips above are easy to implement, provided you have an integrated tech stack. More specifically, if you have loyalty, review and email marketing solutions that are the best in their niche and designed to complement each other.
Influence has been built with powerful integrations in mind. It’s the ideal tool to use alongside REVIEWS.io and Klaviyo, and the combination of all three allows for the seamless transfer of customer data. Try out Influence for free!
Build a tech stack that works today and start your data driven strategy for business growth.
Integrating loyalty and review programs creates a feedback loop: loyal customers leave reviews, and reviews attract new loyalty members. Together, they improve engagement and revenue.
Zero-party data collected through reviews, like customer preferences or attributes, can be used to segment audiences and tailor loyalty rewards.
UGC like photos and star ratings adds social proof to loyalty emails, making promotions more credible and encouraging higher conversions.
When a customer leaves a 5-star review, it shows they’re at peak satisfaction. That moment can be used to automatically invite them into a referral program, increasing the likelihood they’ll recommend your brand to friends and family.
By merging loyalty data (like purchase frequency and spending habits) with review insights (like preferences and product feedback), you can create highly accurate customer profiles. These profiles make paid ads more targeted, reducing wasted spend and attracting higher-value customers.