Dive into the intricacies of loyalty and incentive marketing, and discover the importance of personalised strategies, analytics, and the evolving nature of loyalty programs.

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.

A term that we commonly use in channel loyalty and incentive programs is the effort advantage ratio. This is the study of consumer loyalty programs and the effort a participant must undertake to achieve a loyalty program reward and how this effort impacted on attractiveness of the loyalty program for their continued participation. 

These are 7 things to consider when weighing up the Effort Advantage Ratio.

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.

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.

Loyalty and incentive programs are powerful tools. Used effectively they can generate habitual behavioral loyalty, increase sales revenue, decrease customer churn, increase share of wallet and limit variety-seeking behavior.  Many of these results have been empirically tested in academic research and in award winning case studies.

Getting the balance right between the hard and soft benefits of your B2B loyalty program can be the key to its effectiveness. Dr. David Cox - CEO writes why soft benefits are the key to keeping participants loyal to your program.

In designing employee recognition programs, it is imperative to be very specific about the kind of behaviours that you want your associates to display (and get rewarded for). Many of our clients make the mistake of relating their incentives to broad and generic corporate values. Instead, the specs are important, as they make for easier and more transparent reward criteria. Also, do consider recognizing your operational managers. For many customer-facing employees, their supervisor, team leader or store manager is a role model who they look to for guidance on good practice. 

A loyalty and incentive company has to behave like a doctor – it has to diagnose the problem before implementing the cure. One common mistake that companies make is, instead of making a personal diagnosis, they just copy what their competitors are doing To avoid these mistakes...

At a Motivforce event held in Sydney, Australia, co-director of Motivforce R&D, Professor Ko de Ruyter presented research on how to best cultivate an engaged social community and focussed on: marketing strategy, customer relationship management, social media and customer loyalty. He used popular culture icon Lady Gaga as an ongoing example throughout his presentation. 

This article was originally posted on crn.com.au