Turning seasonal demand into lasting customer relationships

TOGETHER WITH

Reenergize engagement. Discounts may help brands make single sales, but they can’t create loyal customers alone. Zeta Global helps retailers reimagine loyalty with engagement-led strategies that build continuity between shopping moments. With flexible targeting and behavioral insight, brands can connect with customers when it matters. Learn more.

Retailers have spent years chasing traffic and relying on promotions for seasonal moments. From holidays to other high-demand periods, these surges are designed to drive site visits fast and at scale. And they work, at least in the short term. They also thin your margins and lead to promotion fatigue for shoppers.

The challenge isn’t generating demand during these moments. It’s sustaining momentum once those moments pass. For brands trying to ensure returning customers, engagement-driven sales strategies are fundamental. When World Market wanted to turn a high-traffic retail moment into a long-term, omnichannel growth opportunity, they rethought how loyalty could work beyond a single season.

Together, World Market partnered with Zeta Global to explore how to transform discounts and create gamified engagement to encourage returning customers all year long.

From incentives to interaction

Think about your email inbox around the holidays or a major retail push. What stands out to you? Not the fifth “last chance” email of the day. This experience is often called offer fatigue, and it’s the reason many traditional loyalty programs fail. If your brand only sends out nonstop discounts, customers will lose interest and stop converting.

The solution is simple: Build deeper relationships with customers across all platforms. For World Market’s Multiply the Magic holiday campaign, the brand wanted to find a way to engage new customers during the shopping season—without the new-year churn.

Instead of relying solely on deeper discounts to recapture attention, World Market created a new strategy that used customer behavior and engagement to complement existing promotions. They gamified and incentivized engagement with punch cards, challenges, and sweepstakes, so customers felt excited about shopping and looked forward to their next visit.

In short, rewarding engagement instead of transactions alone naturally encourages loyalty.

Getting to know your customers

Engagement’s role as the retail golden ticket is no surprise. Across the industry, “the sale” is being reimagined. As brands get to know their customers, it’s becoming clear that blanket promotions just don’t connect the way they used to.

The proof is in the numbers. World Market’s Multiply the Magic campaign turned the holiday rush into a year-round loyalty engine driven by customer data. World Market reports a whopping 6m members participated in the campaign, with 2.5m SMS clicks. And reviews soared to 17k (a 300% boost) while maintaining a 4.7 average rating.

By rewarding participation and curiosity, one-time shoppers are incentivized to return, creating long-term customers.

Making loyalty repeatable

Behind the scenes, the technology supporting the program enabled the flexibility and behavioral targeting required to bring this approach. This is what allowed World Market to shift to an engagement-based loyalty program.

Zeta Global connects loyalty, data, and personalization into one seamless platform. With these tools in one place, retailers can create long-term customers while nurturing engagement between seasonal pushes.

When you understand what motivates your customers, they can tell—and they tend to stick around. Here’s how it works: Zero-party data, or the preferences customers willingly share, gives brands clear, actionable insight into intent.

From there, retailers deliver personalized shopping experiences that lead to deeper relationships with their customers. And once those campaigns are built, they can be reused across any market, channel, and occasion your brand is targeting.

Time for a boost

You don’t have to wait until the next holiday or seasonal moment to revamp your loyalty program. Leave those tired set-it-and-forget-it discount campaigns in the past. Meet your customers where they are with the engagement they’re looking for.

Learn how Zeta Global helps brands turn engagement into lasting customer relationships.