In the luxury sector, relationships make or break a brand. Whether your brand crafts bespoke timepieces, hosts guests at five-star resorts, or offers curated private travel, the ability to recognize, understand, and connect with ultra-high-net-worth individuals (UHNWIs) can ensure your competitive advantage.
Use this clienteling guide to learn how data can empower luxury brands to strengthen relationships and deliver authentic, high-impact experiences. Drawing from Altrata’s years of experience working with clients seeking to effectively engage UHNW clients, we’ll walk through practical steps to optimize clienteling using real-time intelligence.
Why clienteling in luxury marketing requires a data evolution
Clienteling is the art of building long-term relationships through personalized service. Today’s clients expect more than a memory of their last purchase; they expect to be known and valued across every touchpoint. This necessitates intelligence that goes deeper than names, preferences, and birthdays.
According to Forrester, advanced insights-driven businesses are eight times more likely to grow by 20% or more annually compared to beginner firms. But only 7% of firms have achieved this advanced maturity, also shown by Forrester research. There is clearly room to grow.
Furthermore, Gartner reports that only 14% of organizations have achieved a 360-degree view of their customers, highlighting the challenges many face in consolidating and effectively utilizing customer data. This means that your organization can either be among the top few with full comprehension of customer data or fall behind without capitalizing on data.
To power clienteling, teams in luxury marketing need tools that provide:
- Comprehensive profiles of top clients and prospects
- Contextual insights on relationships and affiliations
- Actionable triggers and alerts to stay engaged in real time
Transform your CRM with better intelligence
Luxury brands often have robust CRM systems in place. What they need is better intelligence inside those systems. It’s critical that luxury brands looking to elevate their client experience integrate data in their CRM. Luxury brands can embed intelligence into their CRMs with data APIs and make wealth intelligence, spending preferences, hobbies and interests, purchase patterns and more, immediately accessible to their whole team.
How data APIs work:
- Matching APIs identify individuals within an external database based on your existing contacts, returning match scores and IDs.
- Profile APIs enrich those matches with detailed career, education, board, and network information.
This automation accelerates segmentation, prioritization, and personalization. This means that instead of spending hours researching who a client is, you can focus on building meaningful engagement strategies with context already in hand.
You save time by matching and enriching contacts at scale, as well as prioritizing outreach based on influence, wealth, and relevance. You’ll be able to plan a robust clienteling strategy, including events, gifting, and loyalty programs more easily.
Relationship intelligence builds trust and access
Wealth screening is only part of the story. To truly engage today’s UHNWIs, luxury brands need to understand who these clients are, what they care about, and who they’re connected to.
You can also consider mapping warm introductions based on shared networks, from past employment to nonprofit boards. A warm introduction may be the key ingredient you need to turn a one-time buyer into a brand evangelist.
Other key profile dimensions:
- Career history: executive roles, board appointments, committee involvement
- Education and memberships: school history, alumni networks, exclusive affiliations
- Affinity data: events attended, donation history, awards, and honors
This level of insight allows luxury brands to tailor outreach in a way that feels relevant, respectful, and relationship-forward. There are many ways to leverage insights to deepen client relationships and drive brand loyalty.
For example, hospitality groups can identify partnerships based on shared memberships. Fine art dealers can invite clients to events they already support through philanthropy. Yachting and aviation brands can qualify prospects based on professional trajectory and influence. Luxury retail brands can reach their customers at the perfect time with insights into their purchasing behavior and potential future needs.
How leading brands use data to transform clienteling
Bombardier, a leading aviation company known for its impressive private jets, used Altrata’s wealth intelligence to enhance their sales strategy by integrating data into their Salesforce platform. This enabled their sales team to gain a more comprehensive view of prospective clients. They were able to assess a prospect’s purchasing capacity and history with high-value items like private jets, facilitating more informed and prioritized outreach. This approach led to higher conversion rates.
Bombardier’s use of Altrata’s insights exemplifies how companies can effectively identify and engage with high-potential clients by seamlessly incorporating wealth intelligence into their CRM systems.
You can learn more by reading the case study.
Another success story to consider is a UK-based fine jewelry company that leveraged wealth intelligence to enhance their client engagement and event strategies.
By accessing in-depth data on the world’s wealthy individuals, the company was able to personalize each customer’s journey, fostering strong, long-term relationships.
They emphasized the impact of integrating data insights into their customer relationship management processes.
This case study underscores the value of incorporating detailed wealth data into luxury retail operations to improve client targeting and engagement.
You can learn more by reading the case study.
This metric can help your organization assess the strength of donor relationships and the effectiveness of stewardship practices.
Aligning data strategy with client experience
The ability to deliver curated, high-touch experiences at scale comes down to how well your organization harnesses data.
Research by Deloitte indicates that customers who enjoy positive experiences are likely to spend 140% more than customers who report negative experiences.
When client acquisition, marketing, guest development, and loyalty teams have access to the same enriched intelligence, the experience becomes seamless—from discovery to long-term loyalty.
You should make sure your data provider enables this alignment by:
- Delivering granular, global intelligence on influential individuals
- Integrating directly with existing CRM and marketing platforms
- Empowering your team with relational context, not just raw data
Using market-level wealth intelligence to guide strategy
In an environment where intuition alone is no longer enough, leveraging market-level intelligence can provide a significant competitive edge. You can use data-driven insights to better understand the distribution of private wealth across cities and economies.
Such demographic data and behavioral insights can be used to empower strategic decision-making on where to invest marketing resources, open new locations, or refine client acquisition strategies. This type of intelligence is particularly valuable for brands seeking to validate expansion strategies or align experiential offerings where high concentrations of UHNW individuals live, travel, and spend.
Final thought: data with purpose creates relationships that last
Authentic clienteling isn’t just about personalization. It’s about understanding who your clients are, what they value, and how to meet them with purpose.
With Altrata, luxury brands gain the context and confidence to build deeper, more durable connections. Whether you’re refining your VIP strategy or enhancing digital experiences, integrating the right data at the right time will always lead to better outcomes.
Check out ways you can maximize your clienteling strategy with a personalized demo from our team. Request a demo here.