Many B2B channel loyalty programs are known for their ‘star’ rewards - the stuff that dreams are made of: a trip to Vegas or the International Space Station on Virgin Galactic and a $100,000 gift card are likely to speak to anyone’s imagination. But does it speak to your business sense? Offering your loyalty program members the opportunity to become an astronaut will set you back by at least $250,000. This would be quite a challenge to your program ROI.

The light at the end of the Covid-19 tunnel. As countries start the process of emerging from lockdown, many C-suite executives will be struggling with challenging cashflow positions and your loyalty program may still run the risk of being deemed ‘non-essential’. So, we felt we needed to go further than offer well-meant advice.

As Covid-19 continues to create chaotic and challenging business condition’s many industry sectors have seen a collapse in sales and huge downturns in trading. Lack of sales is like a horror movie for all businesses. And if your company has a loyalty programme, how can you maintain participant engagement, when the core concept of rewarding for sales has been eliminated?

The answer is to use this downtime as an opportunity.

Internal misalignment often begins with a lack of a strategic vision, while clarity starts with a clear sales, marketing and loyalty strategy. Developing a cohesive strategy educates the entire company on the expectations. A clear and complete vision of the program will pre-empt a “let’s-slash-the-loyalty-budget” attitude. Educating company stakeholders is an ongoing process. Like anything else, if they don’t understand its value, you are not going to get their buy-in.

A GOOD PLACE TO START IS TO IDENTIFY A NUMBER OF COMMON MISCONCEPTIONS;

At Motivforce we have been helping clients to deploy Business Partner-driven strategies in order to improve their performance, agility and profitability. Although this is still core to our business, we also work on a growing interest in measuring the impact of employees on the bottom line. Employees are arguably a company’s most valuable resource, as they are sources of innovation and knowledge and allow for competing through service excellence.

Voluntary executive learning is an important element of many B2B loyalty and channel programs. Indeed the cost effectiveness that the digital revolution has offered to program sponsors allows for the deployment of online e-learning modules quickly, covering remote geographies and in multiple languages.

Whilst the digital revolution encompassing online platforms has heralded a new age in corporate learning, the advancement in learning structure and content has not moved at the same pace.

It seems that the 2018 obituary for offline communications and tactics in loyalty and channel incentives programs has been premature. Indeed, we have seen an increase in program sponsors allocating budgets to offline executions during the first eight months of 2018, signaling a retreat from the sole reliance on digital communications.

Just in case you might have missed it; a wind of change has started to blow in the loyalty marketing landscape. In Europe the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is about to go live and it marks a heightened privacy consciousness among businesses and their customers. And ultimately, we expect that the principles of GDPR will go global.

Even if you are not operating from the EU, it is not a bad idea to start reflecting on what the new model of data protection will mean for you and your program. Almost certainly, the bar will be raised and your program members will expect you to take your protection of their data to a whole new level.

So, are you GDPR ready? Read on

There has been a lot of debate in recent months about the most effective metrics to use when assessing the performance of a loyalty or incentive program.

To see the real effect of the power of loyalty and incentive program it is also recommended to use Confrere Analysis.

In our conversations with organizations that are assessing B2B loyalty and incentive programs, a number of negative perceptions inevitably surface.

Here are the top 5 myths about loyalty programs and our evidence as to why they simply aren’t true. 

Clients often point out that many loyalty program members cheat and that making compliance rules stricter hardly seems to have any effect. It’s not like they’re all bad apples, it’s just that a lot of members seem to curb honesty, here, there and everywhere.