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You're busy, we're busy — let's save some time. Here's the top four loyalty drivers you need to know from this article:

1. Immersion
2. Personalization
3. Exclusivity
4. Consumer Involvement

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In today’s competitive market, consumer loyalty is more important than ever. According to the Institute for Business Value, 62% of Gen Z, the new spending generation, are first and foremost attracted to new brands from growth markets. Still, only 47% are attracted to mature markets. This means capturing attention is vital, especially as an established brand with history. 

But the buck doesn’t stop at awareness: you must maintain customers' loyalty to your brand to keep engagement strong, drive repeat purchases, and spread brand awareness to more people.

Experiential marketing, like hosting owned events, activating out in the community, and offering tours of your brand home, creates memories that solidify your brand in consumers' hearts and minds. After all, evoking an emotion or human connection with a consumer can boost their value by 52% above the benchmark, according to the Harvard Business Review. (See graphic below.)

At the heart of brand loyalty strategy lies experiential marketing—the emotionally driven, memory-creating, and immersive marketing effort that drives awareness and purchases through improved brand recall. How do you hone your experiential marketing strategy to increase the rate at which your consumers choose your product over others in the same category?

We recommend the following strategies:

1. Deeper Immersive Brand Experiences
2. Exclusive Events & VIP Programs
3. Interactive and Participatory Campaigns
4. Personalized Follow-Up and Communication

Understanding Experiential Marketing

Before we move forward, let’s get on the same page.

What is Experiential Marketing?

Experiential marketing is a strategy in which a brand engages consumers face-to-face through immersive, interactive, and memorable experiences.

Why is Experiential Marketing Important for Loyalty?

Experiential marketing is effective because it builds lasting connections with consumers. It uses a curated, physical moment to create a memorable experience for consumers who will walk away with a lasting impression and an emotional connection. 

By building that lasting connection, experiential marketing helps drive better brand recall and repeat buying when consumers purchase in your category.

Creating Immersive Brand Experiences

Immersion is everywhere, from virtual and augmented reality to 4D movie experiences. For brands, creating a world or moment your consumer can get lost in is a hallmark of good immersion.

After COVID, the value of in-person experiences increased since, for years, anything outside of digital tech was limited. Even now, we’re still looking to adventure, explore, and create new memories rather than purchase things; it’s a new way of thinking about investment in self and well-being, and brands that can answer that need have a competitive edge.

What Makes Branded Experiences Memorable?

Think of the canned soup your mom made you on a snow day. What about the first pair of ballet shoes you got your daughter when she was 8? When you remember those moments, you’re hit with nostalgia, warmth, and a sense of loss that drives you to feel it all again.

These experiences stay with you for the rest of your life, as do the brands that were a part of the moment.

This memory-building allows brands to connect with buyers and leave a lasting impression. But that’s not just guesswork. 

A good, memorable brand experience takes dedicated research, in-depth audience knowledge, and an understanding of where stories and business intersect.

You connect your brand to a memory or feeling through innovation and real-life events. When you deliver moments that resonate, you create company attachment— just like soup and ballet shoes.

Example: Johnnie Walker Princes Street

“Your adventure awaits with our range of experiences and tours at Johnnie Walker Princes Street in Edinburgh. Start your whisky adventure with our Johnnie Walker Journey of Flavour tour, taste single malts with our Whisky Explorers at the Explorers Bothy bar, or try exclusive whiskies straight from the cask during our Whisky Makers' Cellar.” -Johnnie Walker Princes Street Website.

Johnnie Walker Princes Street is the Edinburgh-located brand home of the famous whisky giant. Through interaction, personalization, and interactivity, they’ve crafted a once-in-a-lifetime experience, bringing their consumers closer to the brand.

Johnnie Walker Princes Street’s experiences are honed to convey its history and go beyond its basic offerings to introduce visiting customers to higher-end whiskeys in a beautiful, multi-colored, and sensory environment. Within the first year of its launch, JWPS was considered among Edinburgh’s top visitor attractions. This early success embodies consumers increasingly seeking memorable experiences and sharing those experiences with others, providing Johnnie Walker with a powerful catalyst for long-term brand growth. 

Using AnyRoad’s experiential marketing platform, they learned that post-visit NPS was 16 points higher than pre-visit NPS, validating the hypothesis that a new level of multi-sensory, immersive experiences creates new brand fans. They also learned that an important but historically under-targeted demographic was 40% more likely to drink whisky after visiting.

Johnnie Walker honed its Princes Street experiences to convey not only the brand’s history but also go beyond its basic offerings to introduce visitors to higher-end whiskeys in a beautiful, multi-colored, and sensory environment. 

Personalizing Follow-Up and Communication

Big investments like exclusive events and giant sweepstakes aren’t the only way to grow loyalty and repeat purchases in experiential marketing. Consider using personalized follow-ups and communication in all your consumer interactions for a lighter touch.

When you capture consumer data as part of your events and experiences—through the booking process or even onsite at third-party events—you can use the opportunity to open up a two-way conversation. With the data you get, you can send personalized emails and offers post-event (if they opt into your marketing comms) and even tailor your follow-up communications when requesting feedback or NPS ratings. 

This additional insight about your consumers can help build stronger consumer profiles, inform future marketing and experiential campaigns, and ultimately grow the success of all consumer engagement. 

Best Practices for Follow-Up Timing

When it comes to sending a post-event follow-up, we recommend sending a thank you email the day after your event with your NPS request (and any other survey questions you might have) and offering an incentive, such as a discount or rebate, to convert them into customers.

Offering Exclusive Events and VIP Experiences for Loyalty

Once your conversation with consumers has begun, you can take it to the next step. Hosting exclusive events and VIP experiences for loyal customers will win their mindshare, deepen their loyalty, and get them to advocate for you.

Smaller, more premium events specifically reward your consumers and are essential for their loyalty, rewarding them with an experience not just anyone can have. When your consumers feel like they’re one of the chosen few, they’ll be more likely to attach the emotional response you evoke to your brand, improving brand loyalty and solidifying strong preference.

From special access, rewards, and beyond, the higher the perceived value of what you plan and create, the more effective it is on wowing consumers and winning loyalty. Accenture found that members of loyalty programs generate between 12 and 18% incremental revenue growth per year compared to non-members, meaning that membership and loyalty go hand in hand.

Get Consumers Involved

Encourage consumer participation with your brand, where consumers are more likely to engage beyond immersion. That could mean entering sweepstakes, like The North Face hosts, or enrolling in a workshop or class series in the style of REI.

A great brand activity includes specialized tastings for new products asking consumers for feedback on their experience. It’s a great way to make consumers feel they’re part of your evolving story and the growth of your products.

These kinds of interaction and participation show commitment and build trust so consumers feel a sense of ownership and internalize how you’ve invested in meeting their needs. By being heard, having their questions answered, or being offered a new skillset or experience, consumers will have a more favorable impression and repeat their purchases with your brand.

Let’s Review

Experiential marketing is a powerful tool for building brand loyalty. When you use a truly immersive brand experience to connect emotionally with your consumer, you increase the chance that their positive view of your brand will drive them to purchase from you. 

Exclusive events and VIP experiences continuously reward consumers for being loyal buyers of your products. involving your consumers in testing and providing feedback on your product can make them feel ownership and encourage further purchasing. 

Finally, when you capture enough data from each activity, you can personalize your communications, hone your messaging, tailor your campaigns towards those same consumers, and begin the process all over again to keep their loyalty strong, transforming them from first-time buyers to loyal customers for life.

If you want more information about post-event follow-ups to get this flywheel turning, check out our blog, ‘Everything You Need to Know About Post-Event Surveys.’