How to keep your loyalty program participants motivated and engaged Part 2

The cost-of-living crisis and rising inflation will cause challenging business conditions for many industry sectors for the foreseeable future. Customers will inevitably review budgets and become more discerning about what they spend their money on.

 If your company has a loyalty program, it is absolutely critical during this period to ramp up efforts to increase engagement with participants, to ensure the program is relevant, front of mind and in a prime position to motivate customers to buy from your business.

 Companies are all in the same boat as their competitors. Those who use this time to reimagine, innovate and inspire will be in a position to thrive as they emerge from yet another global storm.  Seize the opportunity.

 In B2B programs, this time can be spent productively by encouraging participants to undertake value-added behaviours, not just sales, thus maintaining vital engagement and brand awareness. Some of these activities include:

 1.     Education and enablement

Make sure you continue to reward channel partners for developing their product knowledge, sales skills, compliance and certifications. Distance learning via short online education modules, quizzes and videos are extremely effective in upskilling your resellers and business partners, ensuring that you remain at the forefront of their choice set when demand returns. In fact our research has indicated that completing education-based tasks has better brand and product recall and longer trailing effects than tactical advertising executions. At Motivforce, we have seen this result with our award winning Know You IBM Program

 2.     Steps to the sale

During normal non-crisis business cycles, many vendors and program sponsors have a desire to understand the potential pipeline of business through their channel and to see where conversion and non-conversion occurs. This helps many to adjust their product and go to market strategy. During periods of soft or non-existent demand, we see a number of program sponsors encouraging and rewarding their participants to enter opportunities and leads into their CRM systems such as salesforce.com. Bonus points are often paid when the lead that is registered in the CRM system is converted to a sale.

 3.     Refer a friend and recruitment

In periods of soft demand, many program participants are motivated by earning points for non-sales activities and one of the most effective is recruitment via refer a friend.  Refer a friend typically works where the referee receives points when they recruit a ‘friend’ who undertakes a point earning activity (e.g. makes a sale, completes a training course, places and order etc). These types of campaigns have proven effective as participants will often refer colleagues whom they believe have the greatest chance to engage in the program and hence trigger bonus points. The Lenovo LEAP program has recently experienced a high level of success with a recent refer a friend program.

 4.     Gamification and social (virtual interactions)

Interconnectivity and interactions between program participants via business games have proven to be a key driver of engagement and behaviour. Leader boards for non-business activities such as testimonials, blogs and contests have proven to be popular whist keeping participants engaged with the program.

  5.     Research

This is the perfect time to launch some serious research into the attitudes, perceptions and motivations to gain deeper insights into your program participants and how these insights can help fine-tune your program. Indeed, some research activities require up to 30-40 mins of a participant’s time and hence, during softening demand, these participants have ample time to engage fully in your program, research activities, where they earn points for completing the surveys or participating in experiments. Research allows you to answer some of the questions associated with your data.

 B2B loyalty programs are a powerful platform and they deliver their best ROI when worked hard in all business cycles - you will be surprised what other benefits they can deliver. During this latest global crisis, businesses need to ensure that they have a strong and engaged channel, that is clear in its focus of what products to sell and what brands to prioritise. Those companies that take time now to invest and structure their loyalty programs, will be in the strongest position to grow sales.