Customer loyalty isn’t what it used to be.
In the not-so-recent past, retaining customers was viewed as the easiest part of the customer journey. The more a customer bought from you, the more likely they were to keep doing so.
But modern ecommerce doesn’t work that way. With endless choices and rising expectations, long-time customers can disappear in an instant. Today, the experience of buying — how personal, seamless, and relevant it feels — determines whether a customer returns or moves on.
Loyalty has entered a new era — one where success requires a new approach and the right tools to stay competitive. Keep reading to learn what it takes to build a modern loyalty strategy and how leading brands are getting results today.
The New Era of Customer Loyalty
Choice is the root of today’s customer loyalty challenge.
With countless options at their fingertips, your audience is spoiled for choices. Deciding to buy from a brand isn’t a simple, straightforward decision. It can happen anywhere, anytime — and your competitors are counting on that.
This is because ecommerce is woven into every corner of the digital experience. A purchase is always just a few clicks away. Your customers inevitably see alternative options to your business everywhere they look online, from search bars and social media to emails and texts. And, they can buy these products instantly through whichever channel they prefer.
The immediacy of all these choices has pushed factors like brand loyalty, previous purchases, and even things like price to the background of buying decisions.
Convenience and personalized experiences are now at the top of your customers’ must-have list — research shows that over half of consumers believe that offers tailored to their preferences are one of the most valued aspects of their shopping experience.
It doesn’t matter whether or not your customers have bought from you in the past — the brand that understands their needs right now is the obvious choice.
Customer Loyalty Is Earned in the Moment
To succeed in this new era where the shopping experience is the deciding factor for customer loyalty, brands need to completely rethink their approach to customer retention.
With choices at every turn, yesterday’s customer loyalty strategies don’t stand a chance. Generic programs that offer blanket deals, simple rewards points, and broad win-back campaigns pale in comparison to the targeted marketing that your customers see every day.
You’re constantly competing for your customer’s loyalty in this new era, and your retention efforts need to be eagle-eyed, far-reaching, and completely personalized to each individual customer.
Meaningful Retention Is Possible With Personalization
So, what do you do when you can’t bank on your previous history with your customers?
You leverage it to meet their needs today.
That’s because, despite the fact that your customers aren’t guaranteed to buy from your brand again, you do have an advantage over competitors: data.
The key to creating a personalized customer journey that makes your brand the obvious choice is using the insights you gained from past interactions to build tailored customer journeys in the here and now.
AI Makes True Personalization Possible
Uncovering and acting on your customer insights isn’t as simple as tweaking your current retention strategy. It requires real-time data analysis on a grand scale.
From a marketer’s and merchandiser’s perspective, this is a herculean task. The sheer volume of data and touchpoints that you need to monitor and manage to achieve this level of personalization would overwhelm any team trying to do so manually.
But with artificial intelligence (AI), you can do it automatically.
With the power of AI, you can seamlessly connect all your channels, website, and app to build an ecommerce ecosystem that makes true personalization possible. It can personalize your content, your campaign triggers, your site layouts, your search results — everything.
The products your customers view and the categories they prefer can inform the recommendations you serve them next. Their inclination to open emails instead of SMS alerts can shape your campaigns. The average length of time between purchases, the time of day they tend to engage with your brand, and their preference for free shipping offers vs. a discount — this information can all be used to personalize their next interaction.
All you need to do is adopt the right AI to make it happen.
AI Built for Today’s Customer Loyalty Challenges
To personalize at the speed and scale that modern ecommerce demands, brands need more than generalized AI models or surface-level automation.
It takes an intelligence layer that’s woven into your operations and understands both how people shop and how ecommerce businesses operate — one designed to turn massive amounts of behavioral and product data into real-time customer experiences that build loyalty with every interaction.
That’s what makes Loomi AI, Bloomreach’s AI built specifically for ecommerce, fundamentally different from other AI tools on the market.
Loomi AI is trained with 15+ years of Bloomreach’s data on how customers shop and search, with sophisticated models and workflows designed to make end-to-end personalization an intuitive process. It’s purpose-built to help brands deliver the moments that matter most for loyalty, adapting journeys to your customers’ needs in real time.
Acting as the connective tissue between all your touchpoints, Loomi AI analyzes real-time customer behavior, product attributes, intent signals, and channel preferences to personalize every interaction — from marketing campaigns and triggered messages to search results, recommendations, and on-site content.
The result is a shopping experience that feels uniquely relevant, no matter where a customer chooses to engage. It makes teams more efficient, touchpoints more impactful, and makes retention an instinctive part of your overall strategy.
It’s the foundation that every brand needs to win long-lasting loyalty. Here’s how you can leverage Loomi AI to power the essential components of a modern loyalty strategy — and the real-world results that Bloomreach is driving today.
The 6 Best Use Cases for a Modern Approach to Customer Loyalty
Seamless Customer Experiences
Today’s shoppers expect every interaction with a brand to feel tailored to their individual preferences. And with Loomi AI, brands can create bespoke customer journeys that listen and respond to their needs in real time.
Revolution Beauty knew it needed to optimize (and individualize) every stage of the customer lifecycle in a fiercely competitive market, which is why the company leveraged Loomi AI to audit key customer data points like the average time between purchases, recurring orders, and preferred communication channels to tailor loyalty campaigns to individual customers.
Loomi AI automatically detected when a customer was ready to reorder, recognized the best channel to engage with them, and sent campaigns that spoke directly to their needs and preferences.
These strategies have empowered the brand to connect with customers exactly when they’re most likely to be looking to make a purchase — and encourage them to shop its products instead of another brand.
The results have been undeniably consequential, resulting in a 22% increase in conversion rates for Revolution Beauty.
Omnichannel Loyalty Programs
To offer the elevated experience that customers expect, brands need to build relationships and offer loyalty incentives — no matter where customers choose to engage. This includes in-store interactions, which can be the hardest touchpoints for brands to track, log, and incorporate into real-time, frictionless experiences.
This is the challenge that Popeyes UK faced with its customer loyalty campaigns. The company knew that hyper-relevant loyalty initiatives could translate to more frequent in-store visits and get the results it was looking for, but disjointed data management systems and communication channels made incorporating in-store interactions difficult.
By adopting Bloomreach and harnessing Loomi AI, Popeyes UK unified its data management, connected its channels, and automated campaigns to build customer loyalty when and where it mattered most.
Popeyes UK drove real results by launching a loyalty program that connected both the offline and online experience. Each customer, no matter where they ordered from, was invited to spin a prize wheel on the brand’s mobile website, winning incentives like free items and discounts that they could use for their next purchase.
Not only were these customers 3x more likely to make a repeat visit to Popeyes UK within 30 days, but the brand can also now incorporate offline data into its personalization efforts.
Tailored On-Site Journeys
Making it easy for returning customers to find the products they’re looking for is an essential piece of the customer loyalty puzzle. Getting your customers back to your website isn’t enough — you need to make browsing, searching, and purchasing on your site a personalized experience, too.
This is what drove equestrian brand SmartPak to enhance its site experience with Loomi AI. Operating in a niche market and catering to a well-informed clientele, the brand recognized that personalized service and tailored experiences were expected from its customers.
With AI-powered search, SmartPak can now use real-time customer and product data to prime its search engine with very specific equine search terms and phrases. This ensures that search results are always relevant, even for highly specialized products.
AI also revamped SmartPak’s merchandising, allowing the team to optimize the site experience based on factors like a customer’s location, the season they’re shopping in, and their previous shopping behavior. Loomi AI can curate site pathways and recommendations, and even auto-generate thematic pages to create the perfect on-site experience for customers.
This AI-powered strategy has paid off, with SmartPak seeing a 15% boost in search revenue — equating to approximately $1.9 million — in just eight months.
Value-Driven Loyalty Initiatives
Meaningful loyalty is about showing your customers you care about them — catering to their preferences, adapting to their changing needs, and aligning with their values.
For modern brands, it’s not enough to offer the products your audience wants. They’re looking for companies that share the same moral compass. And for more and more customers, sustainability is a top priority.
But this can’t simply be lip service — you need to actively demonstrate your commitment to what customers value during every interaction, from shopping to shipping. This is where AI can help.
When the cycling brand Isadore adopted Bloomreach, it had this very challenge in mind for Loomi AI. The company wanted to create a personalized customer experience that upheld its commitment to sustainability, and it saw a clear opportunity for Loomi AI to help tackle a substantial ecommerce challenge: product returns.
Returns are costly — for both the planet and businesses — due to the emissions, packaging, and redistribution associated with the return process. The retail industry in particular has struggled to prevent returns, with the cost of returns expected to reach a staggering $850 billion in 2025.
But with the help of AI, Isadore was able to tailor its on-site shopping experience to mitigate the chance of returns, producing lucrative results and showing its customers that it really cared.
Isadore recognized that one clear indicator of a potential return was when a customer adds two products in different sizes to their carts, so it enlisted Loomi AI to look out for these instances and step in to help. As soon as two identical items are added, a weblayer automatically prompts the shopper with more information about sizing to help find the right size for them, and connects them directly with Isadore’s support team for assistance if necessary.
With Loomi AI piloting this return-prevention weblayer, Isadore has made a meaningful impact on returned products, decreasing potential returns by 29%. Not only does this reduce the environmental footprint that returns cause, it also curbs the lost revenue that returns have on Isadore’s bottom line.
Exclusive Loyalty Tiers and Incentives
Just because customer retention has become a much more immediate and meticulous challenge, that doesn’t mean that loyalty programs as a concept aren’t incredibly useful.
Loyalty programs are still great tools. They just need to be personal, rewarding, and exclusive. You need to move beyond the standard earn-and-burn reward points and offer a VIP experience to your customers to make a real impact.
Plus, the benefits of a modern loyalty program can influence your KPIs across the board. It can be crafted to align with your most important business goals — with the right approach, you can grow a loyal, engaged audience that is receptive to your most revenue-driving campaigns.
Vitaminstore’s loyalty program is a perfect example of this versatile strategy. Facing an increasingly competitive market, the brand aimed to overhaul its loyalty program with Loomi AI.
Vitaminstore created a new and improved loyalty program, VitaminClub, which grouped customers into three levels based on their relationships with the brand. With the help of Loomi AI, these levels organized shoppers by their spending and buying habits and used these data points to reward returning customers with individualized deals and incentives.
As shoppers climb up the loyalty program tiers, Loomi AI streamlines the experience to ensure customers are always automatically served the right deals, rewards, and recommendations based on their shopping habits.
This focus on customer satisfaction has been revolutionary, resulting in a 33% higher AOV for VitaminClub members vs. nonmembers, as well as 73% more revenue from branded products.
Conversational Shopping
The modern demand for seamless, personalized, and real-time customer relationships calls for a fundamental shift in how brands create online shopping experiences, moving from purely transactional touchpoints to conversational ones.
Your customers don’t want ads to be the only way they interact with your brand, nor do they want to deal with the hassle of endlessly scrolling, sorting, and searching through products to make their next purchase. They want a guided, intuitive experience that leads them straight to the perfect solution — and they want it when and where it’s most convenient.
With the emergence of conversational AI, this level of personalization is now possible. Conversational AI can act as a personal shopping assistant for your customers, offering the real-time, guided shopping journey they’d get from chatting with a knowledgeable employee in person. Plus, it can do so across a wide range of formats, whether it’s a chatbox pop-up or an embedded help center on a product listing page.
This incredible potential is what inspired TFG to incorporate conversational AI into the customer experience of its subsidiary brand, Bash. The South African-based retail group saw AI as a way to position the business above the rest in the competitive world of high-quality fashion, and by integrating AI just in time for Black Friday, it had an ideal scenario for the technology to prove how consequential it could be.
Right from the start, it delivered results. With the ability to understand each customer’s history with the brand and respond to their real-time needs via a chat box as they shopped on Bash’s site, Bloomreach’s conversational AI agent, powered by Loomi AI, opened up a whole new shopping journey for customers.
And once implemented, it could be trusted to act as a brand expert without additional engineering support, learning from each new interaction to provide deeper, more nuanced answers and handle abstract questions.
This produced head-turning results during the busy Black Friday period: Customers who engaged with conversational AI during Black Friday yielded a 35.2% conversion rate, significantly higher than the norm. Additionally, Bash saw a 39.8% higher revenue per visit from customers who interacted with AI.
Now, the brand is exploring even more ways to implement conversational AI to entice customers to come back again and again.
Unlock AI-Powered Loyalty With Bloomreach
For brands looking to come out on top in the modern-day struggle for customer loyalty, there’s only one solution that offers the AI-powered capabilities essential for success: Bloomreach.
Our all-in-one personalization platform delivers the full suite of solutions modern businesses need for an integrated, future-proof tech stack — all powered by Loomi AI, the intelligence layer designed for ecommerce.
- AI-powered marketing that orchestrates, automates, and continuously optimizes campaigns
- Autonomous search that understands intent and gets smarter with every interaction
- Conversational AI that offers real-time guidance as shoppers navigate your site
With Loomi AI powering your consolidated solutions, you can build the modern retention strategy today’s customers expect — and achieve meaningful results like Revolution Beauty, Popeyes UK, Vitaminstore, TFG, and 1,400+ top ecommerce brands that trust Bloomreach.
Visit our site to learn how Bloomreach can help you implement an AI-powered loyalty strategy today.
