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For billions of people worldwide, the pandemic changed everything.

Work, school, shopping, leisure…is there any aspect of our lives that wasn’t affected?

For CMOs, staying ahead of changing consumer behavior has been incredibly challenging. But we’re now entering the post-COVID era, so let’s pause for a moment, catch our breath, and consider, what are consumers like today? Who are they, what do they want, and what do you need to do to keep them satisfied and loyal to your brand?

Let’s take a look.

Expectations are high

During COVID, e-commerce retail sales increased dramatically, with nearly $220 billion of revenue added in the past two years. Subscriptions exploded as well, worth $650 billion and expected to grow to a value of $1.5 trillion by 2025. People are now accustomed to having the things that they love, whenever they want, without leaving home.

This new approach has made consumers more savvy than ever. They expect companies to provide them with constant, frictionless, and personalized access to their choice of products and services. They most certainly do not want to wake up in the morning and discover their subscription has been disconnected and they are cut off. Companies are feeling it, with 93% of customer service teams saying that customers have higher expectations than before the pandemic.

Subscriptions = loyalty

There’s another way to look at the focused behavior and high expectations so common among consumers now. Consider that subscriptions are actually an expression of loyalty. When a customer decides to hand over their credit card for recurring payments, it means they trust that the brand will satisfy and delight them. They believe their subscription will be comfortable, easy, convenient, and valuable. For CMOs, this is a potential gold mine.

Subscriptions enable you to stay constantly connected to your customers, day in, day out, and leverage every touchpoint to strengthen their bond with your brand and build loyalty and revenue. So, while the post-COVID consumer is more demanding, they are also more available and open to experiences, which is an incredible opportunity for you.

Finding your marketing sweet spot in a world without cookies

We are not only approaching a post-COVID world, but a post-cookie world too. For marketers, Google’s impending elimination of third-party cookies is going to impact the ability to target consumers in profound ways. The main one being that there is a growing and urgent need to replace reliance on cookies with access to first-party data. And that’s where subscriptions are a huge winner.

With subscription intelligence, marketers can gain the insights they need to polish their brand message and story – and personalize journeys and bundles for individual users. This is essential to target the right consumers with amazing subscription experiences over and above your competitors. Nothing says “user behavior” and “preferences” like subscriptions can. With subscriptions, customers are continually connected to your business, and that provides a rich and revealing view of their activity, allowing marketers to create a better brand impact.

How to adapt your marketing to the post-COVID consumer?

It’s 2022, and consumers are savvier, pickier, and have higher expectations. In every consumer vertical, competition is tight, and more companies are offering subscriptions than ever. There’s no denying that CMOs today are facing formidable challenges.

At the same time, a shift in perspective can shed a new light on the post-COVID consumer. During the pandemic, people were hungry to connect; they wanted to feel less anxious, they wanted ease, purpose and hope. By creating powerful subscriptions that lean in to these consumer desires, marketers are actually creating a loyalty engine that drives revenue. Crucially, the subscription model also delivers first-party data for marketers to analyze so they can make better decisions that enable scale.

This is the circle of life for subscriptions in a post-COVID world. Are you ready to hop on?