How to supercharge your loyalty and referral programs with a customer data platform

Capturing and keeping the attention and loyalty of your customers is a recurring priority for marketers today. Referral and loyalty programs are both great ways to accomplish this long-term, but they can’t exist in a vacuum. 

Referral and loyalty programs continuously provide important insights into your customer base. Referral programs reveal who your brand advocates are, as they’re sharing your brand with their friends and family. And studying your loyalty program will show you what motivates your customers to keep coming back and buying again - are they interested in earning points, being invited to exclusive events, getting free products, or all of the above? This data is a goldmine that is too often left untapped, when not connected to a customer data platform (CDP). 

That’s why Friendbuy, the leading referral and loyalty marketing platform, has built a two-way integration with Twilio Segment.

This new integration was built to help marketers like you acquire customers faster through referrals, and engage and retain customers with a loyalty program fuelled by integrated data. This article will explore how to make the most of that integration, and ultimately level up your loyalty and referral programs by combining them with Twilio Segment. 

Importance of having a customer data platform

To lay the groundwork, let's understand what a customer data platform is. A CDP, such as Twilio Segment, serves as a centralized hub for managing and leveraging customer data. By consolidating data from various sources, businesses gain a comprehensive understanding of their customers, allowing for more targeted and personalized marketing efforts.

In fact, companies that utilize CDPs experience a 20% increase in customer lifetime value and a 30% rise in customer retention.

Importance of having a referral program

Referral programs empower customers to become brand advocates, driving new customer acquisition while fostering a sense of loyalty.

When satisfied customers refer your business to their network, you gain access to a highly engaged and qualified audience. For example, Natural Dog Company has seen that their referred Friends have an 11% higher average order value (AOV) compared to sitewide shoppers. And, their advocates have a 20% higher AOV compared to sitewide. 

So not only are you utilizing your existing customer base to bring in new qualified customers, but your existing customers are incentivized to continue to come back and buy (and buy more). That’s why Friendbuy’s referral programs typically have a 25x return on spend. 

Another example comes from Imperfect Foods, who uses Twilio Segment as a CDP and has a Friendbuy referral program. Here are the results they’ve seen… 

“We’re really excited, we’re going to be revamping our referral offering, experimenting with new moments and new rewards, and much better personalization with Friendbuy and Twilio Segment.”

- Ben Kane, Senior Growth Product Manager, Imperfect Foods

Importance of loyalty programs

Loyalty programs cultivate lasting relationships with customers by rewarding their continued engagement. By offering incentives, exclusive offers, and personalized experiences, loyalty programs inspire customers to choose your brand over and over again. And according to a study by Harvard Business Review, increasing customer retention rates by 5% can increase profits by 25-95%.

One great example of that comes from Saalt, a DTC brand that sells sustainable period underwear and reusable period cups. With their Friendbuy Loyalty Program, they’ve seen a 41% repeat purchase rate and a 28% higher AOV from their loyalty program members. 

"We have a product that people want to talk about. It’s something that they buy, they use, and then feel compelled to share with their friends. So it's kind of that magic around a Friendbuy referral and loyalty program, which gives them a vehicle to fuel that passion.” 

- Bridget Laye, Director of Customer Experience, Saalt

Integrating your Twilio Segment with your referral, and loyalty programs

Integrating Twilio Segment with your referral and loyalty programs not only makes your life easier as a marketer, it’s essential for keeping your customer communications personalized.

By centralizing your customer data, you’ll have access to invaluable insights into customer behavior, preferences, and engagement patterns. This holistic view allows for seamless tracking and analysis across multiple channels, ensuring consistent and personalized experiences throughout the customer journey. 

The Friendbuy and Twilio Segment integration

Friendbuy and Twilio Segment’s two-way integration was built to help marketers like you acquire customers faster through referrals, and engage and retain customers with a loyalty program fuelled by integrated data. 

By using Friendbuy and Twilio Segment together, you can launch your referral and loyalty programs quickly through your Twilio Segment Workspace. This means you can seamlessly integrate, launch, and optimize your referral and loyalty programs through your Twilio Segment dashboard with the web and cloud destination actions. You’ll be able to quickly load Friendbuy's JavaScript, enable referral and loyalty event tracking and attribution, enable customer-facing referral widgets, and send Friendbuy customer data and purchase events to trigger rewards to customers.

You can also personalize customer journeys by sending referral and loyalty event data to Twilio Segment in real time, so you can send data instantly to connected tools like your data warehouse. You can automatically send customer data, referral event data, loyalty event data and reward event data.

Conclusion

By leveraging the power of Twilio Segment and integrating it seamlessly with referral and loyalty programs, you can unlock the full potential of your customer data. If you’d like to learn more about the Friendbuy and Twilio Segment integration, reach out to your Twilio Segment customer success representative or book a meeting with Friendbuy here.