Practical Uses of AI in Customer Loyalty: Affinity Segments

Every marketer has a familiar playbook: identify your loyal buyers, craft a compelling offer, and send it their way. But, when considering audience segments, what if the next best customer isn’t the satisfied customer who’s bought a certain product before—but the one who almost did?

That’s the opportunity behind Affinity Segments.

Rather than relying solely on known purchase behaviors, this AI-driven feature harnesses deep data signals to surface customers who haven’t bought yet—but should. These are the individuals whose behaviors echo those of your most loyal, repeat buyers, signaling a strong, if untapped, product affinity.

It’s a smart pivot from reacting to predicting. And it could transform how you launch products, run promotions, expand reach, and drive repeat business—all while reducing spend.

Why Affinity Segments Matter

Personalized marketing has always been the gold standard, but achieving it at scale is a real hurdle. Traditional segmentation leans heavily on historical purchases. You know what a customer bought, so you show them more of the same. It’s an effective tactic but you could be doing more. A strong customer loyalty program relies on understanding and exceeding customer expectations, ensuring that every interaction is tailored to foster long-term relationships.

Affinity Segments, powered by Clutch’s recommendation engine, flip this model. Leveraging customer data, instead of building a campaign around past buyers, you’re building it around likely buyers—those showing high intent and shared behaviors with top customers.

This enables smarter targeting for:

Product Launches:

Reach customers likely to care, even if they’ve never purchased from the category.

Customer Cross-Sell:

Getting customers out of their standard habits and getting them into shopping categories not previously shopped before

Reengagement Efforts:

Find new pathways to turn dormant customers into repeat customers.

Efficient Customer Outreach:

Trade broad email blasts for focused lists with higher conversion potential.

The Use Case

Imagine you’re preparing to launch a new line of eco-friendly kitchenware. You already have a segment of customers who’ve purchased similar products. That’s your low-hanging fruit. But Affinity Segments takes it further.

The model scans for behavioral parallels—browsing habits, cart behavior, even shared affinities with purchasers—and identifies a set of customers who haven’t bought yet but align closely with the new product’s audience.

Now, instead of blasting a generic campaign to everyone, you deliver a personalized message to a curated list of high-affinity prospects. These are people who might not have considered your kitchenware before—but once they see it, it clicks.

To further incentivize customer loyalty, you could offer these high-affinity customers a rewards program where customers earn points for their first purchase. As part of your strategy, you might also grant them exclusive access to new product launches or special offers, making them feel valued and encouraging deeper loyalty.

The result? More meaningful engagement, stronger click-throughs, higher customer lifetime value, and better conversion rates—without blowing your budget on a broad campaign.

Why It Works

Reaching beyond your current customer base usually means casting a wide net. That’s expensive, imprecise, and frankly, outdated. With Affinity Segments, you cut through the noise. You’re not guessing—you’re using machine-learned intelligence to deliver the right message to the right person at the right time.

It feels less like a promotion and more like a recommendation from someone who knows you well. And when marketing feels like that, it works.

When combined with loyalty and promotion strategies, these targeted recommendations become a powerful sales tool. Integrating Affinity Segments with a loyalty program allows you to further personalize offers, tailoring rewards and incentives to each customer's preferences and behaviors. Imagine a returning, loyal customer browsing your site. They see a recommended item, clearly labeled: “Recommended for you – buy now and earn double points with your rewards account.”

That’s personalization with purpose.

Under the Hood

So how does it work?

Clutch’s Product Affinity Segment Creator taps into behavioral data to assess affinity scores for individual SKUs or groups. Once the data is modeled, the system dynamically generates a segment of customers with high scores—those most likely to convert with the right nudge. These segments are easy to export into existing marketing workflows, whether it’s email, SMS, paid social, or on-site personalization. These segments can also be used to enhance customer onboarding processes by delivering relevant content to new customers.

Marketers can fine-tune parameters—choose product sets, exclude recent purchasers, or layer in additional filters like loyalty tier or geographic data. And the heavy lifting? It’s all automated.

Customer success teams can leverage these automated segments to proactively engage high-potential customers and drive customer retention.

What used to take a day of spreadsheet wizardry and list-pulling now takes minutes.

Affinity Segments + Product Recommendations: Better Together

Now here’s where the magic happens.

Affinity Segments and Product Recommendations aren’t just parallel features. They’re strategic partners in your customer engagement toolkit. Where Affinity Segments identify the right people, Product Recommendations identify the right product. Together, they create a feedback loop of precision and value, ultimately driving customer loyalty and retention.

Think of Affinity Segments as your targeting engine—finding the high-intent, lookalike customers that you’d otherwise miss. Then layer on Clutch’s AI-driven Product Recommendations to ensure each customer receives an offer that feels timely, relevant, and genuinely helpful.

Let’s go back to our eco-friendly kitchenware launch. You use Affinity Segments to find customers who haven’t purchased in the category but exhibit similar behaviors to your top cookware buyers. Then, you use Product Recommendations to serve them specific SKUs—perhaps a bamboo cutting board or a compost bin starter set.

You’re not only reaching the right people. You’re delivering the right message. That’s where customer loyalty and retention are built and ROI skyrockets.

To dive deeper into how Product Recommendations drive loyalty and revenue, check out our dedicated article: Practical Uses of AI in Customer Loyalty: Product Recommendations.

Tangible Benefits

Better ROI:

By focusing on high-probability converters, you improve cost efficiency across every channel. Affinity Segments reduce the waste associated with mass sends and maximize the impact of each dollar spent.

Faster Testing:

Use Affinity Segments to validate product-market fit without betting the farm. If your affinity-driven test segment converts well, you’ve got green lights for broader campaigns.

Scalable Personalization:

What once took days of manual segmentation and QA can now be accomplished in real time. That means more time for strategic planning—and fewer late nights wrestling with pivot tables.

Smarter Customer Retention:

Combined with your loyalty strategy, Affinity Segments help turn in-active customers into loyal customers by targeting them with products that align to their untapped interests—rather than simply recycling old favorites.

Final Thoughts

In a landscape where attention is scarce and personalization is expected, Affinity Segments offer a competitive edge. They let you go beyond what a customer has done and speak to what they might do next.

This isn’t about segmenting your audience. It’s about understanding your future customers before they know they’re yours.

And when you pair Affinity Segments with AI-powered Product Recommendations, you’ve got a full-circle customer loyalty strategy: identify the best-fit customers, deliver the best-fit products, and reinforce it all with customer retention-driving incentives.

That’s not just marketing—it’s intelligent, individualized commerce.