Four ways to drive retention with mParticle Lifetime Profiles for Audiences

It’s much more costly to acquire new customers than to retain existing ones. In fact, some sources are reporting that the cost of acquisition can be 5X higher than the cost of retention. 

One advantage brands have when investing in retention is that they have so much more information about their existing customers. Brands can use this knowledge to personalize experiences and strengthen customer relationships. Yet, due to data challenges, it’s often difficult for brands to convert customer knowledge into personalized experiences at scale.

Specifically, some brands struggle to activate their historical data for real-time experiences, especially in the realm of segmentation and targeting. Historically, long-term data storage and the delivery of real-time experiences are two data jobs that are handled by different parts of the tech stack—storage often handled by the data warehouse, and delivery often handled by an email service provider or similar engagement tool. mParticle bridges this gap with Lifetime Profiles, combining the insight of historical data access with the power of real-time data streaming.

Lifetime Profiles for Audiences (LPA) helps brands drive retention by giving them instant access to all of the historical user data stored in mParticle. They can use this data to target the right customers with real-time, personalized experiences, powered by mParticle Audience partners. 

As customers engage with a brand over a multi-year time period, mParticle builds customer profiles that get increasingly rich over time. This customer profile gets an extended lifetime within our real-time Audience engine. This means rich customer profiles, and all of the data stored on them, are instantly accessible when brands build Real-time Audiences and Calculated Attributes.

With Lifetime Profiles for Audiences, brands generate maximum value from all the hard-won customer data they’ve collected, and more importantly, can deliver increasingly personalized experiences across the entire customer lifetime. 

Let’s take a look at four use cases where Lifetime Profiles for Audiences drives retention and reengagement.

Churn is frustrating. But a well designed win-back program can get users to come back to your app after they’ve churned. Thankfully, mParticle tracks and stores valuable customer information, such as favorite products, preferred engagement channels, and more, throughout a customer’s lifecycle. 

If a customer churns, you can use the customer data collected to run churn analysis and personalize win-back campaigns. Specifically, you can use user attributes as conditions to build a Real-time Audience, like:

• Churn Status is [churned]
• Favorite Genre of Show is [comedy]

With Lifetime Profiles for Audiences  turned on, this Audience will stay up-to-date in real-time, instantly pulling in users who meet that criteria. Once a user is a member of this Audience, they’ll remain a member, whether they churned a year or month ago (assuming they still meet the criteria).

Some businesses are fundamentally seasonal in nature. If you live in the United States, you might be familiar with Spirit Halloween, who appear only once a year in October to sell Halloween costumes. Alternatively, some brands might operate all year but have seasonal customers, like parents who buy childrens’ clothing for the back-to-school period. 

Seasonality and irregular customer engagement hits directly at the aforementioned data challenges with historical storage and real-time access. Other data management and engagement platforms only make users’ data accessible in real-time if the user engages on a frequent basis, such as every month or week. If the users visit infrequently, such as once or twice a year, data may be inaccessible on a real-time basis, making it impossible to personalize the experience in real time. 

With Lifetime Profiles for Audiences, brands can use rich customer profiles to power real-time experiences, regardless of how frequently the user engages with the brand. 

Lifetime Profiles enable you to interact with seasonal customers not only before they re-engage, but also once they re-engage, personalizing the in-app experience. 

In addition to using “traditional” profile data, like user attributes or identities, to build Audiences, you can use membership in other Audiences itself as Audience criteria. Because Lifetime Profiles extends a profile’s lifetime within the Real-time Audience engine, once a user is a member of an Audience, they’ll continue to be so forever*.  This allows teams to use Audience membership as an indication of past behavior and preferences, like seasonal shopping.

* With LPA turned on, a user will continue to be a member of an Audience up until the length of the profile data retention period, which is customizable by mParticle customers.

For brands to orchestrate multi-year customer journeys, it’s important for them to be able to access a single, historical profile of the customer. As customers engage with a brand on multiple channels and devices throughout the years, brands can log the key moments that signal a customer’s relationship with the brand has changed, such as a change in loyalty status,  churn, or first purchase. At these key moments, brands can deliver a personalized experience. 

With Lifetime Profiles and Journeys, brands can deliver a consistent series of experiences across these milestones: users who receive a specific experience at milestone 3 will only get it if they’ve reached milestone 2, and so on. 

Delivering personalized experiences in sequence, across multiple years, is really difficult to do manually. Lifetime Profiles and Journeys ensure that brands maintain a consistent relationship with customers over time, celebrating each customer milestones and nudging customers towards the next.

Some short-term insights, like knowing a customer’s last purchase, are great. By combining Lifetime Profiles and Calculated Attributes, teams can generate customer insights that get more valuable over time, such as lifetime value, total watch time, and average order value. 

At mParticle, our Calculated Attributes feature is powered by our Real-time Audience engine. Lifetime Profiles extends the profile lifetime in that engine, which allows Calculated Attributes to maintain and update customer insights across a multi-year period, regardless of how frequently a user has engaged. 

This means “long-term” insights like customer lifetime value or total watch time, continuously update and stay accurate. Brands can then use these insights as conditions in Real-time Audiences to personalize customer experiences.

Lifetime Profiles for Audiences helps brands drive retention and long-term engagement. With richer customer profiles in hand, brands can build granular Audiences and personalize customer experiences.