At 3radical, we help B2B companies to digitize their incentive programs, most recently helping Essilor Ltd., the world’s leading ophthalmic lens, frames, and sunglasses manufacturer, move their partner rewards program fulfillment online, with impressive early engagement metrics.
A B2B incentive program is an effective way to increase customer retention and loyalty. However, many companies still rely on manual rewards redemption and fulfillment, delivering a poor experience for the partner (and avoidable work for their employees). Worst-case scenario – customers will choose to order from another partner because they prefer the ease with which their rewards program works.
Do you have a manual rewards or incentive program at your B2B company?
If you have a manual incentive or rewards program at your company, chances are you rely on your customers to fill out and post or email forms to redeem. This process can feel ‘too hard’ and, if the prizes or rewards are not strong enough, your customers might prefer to buy from another provider. The goal of a rewards program is to incentivize behavior and to collect marketing opt in email addresses.
What about personalization?
A B2B customer relationship is built on trust and transparency. B2B customers are likely to remain loyal for more extended periods and make larger purchases over time. In B2B sales, you’ll have fewer customers than in the B2C world, you’re more likely to know them better, which means personalization isn’t just necessary, it’s vital to maintain harmonious relations.
This is particularly true if the customer feels in a safe pair of hands, where risk is low, and incentives are high. If that’s true, creating an incentives program with minimum barriers to redemption is paramount, in particular with new customers, where you’re building the relationship from a blank slate.
The good news is there are simple ways you can digitize this process to take your programs from cumbersome manual processes to easily managed and successful programs.
The top benefits of an online B2B incentive program include:
1 – Greater time efficiencies
Manual incentive programs take time to produce, from idea development to design and printing, packaging, and sending out packs. However, companies can eradicate this by taking the program online with a dedicated landing page.
2 – Greater cost efficiencies
A positive knock-on effect of removing physical printing, postage, and packaging is the cost. You may no longer have to print and guesstimate volumes or personalize 50 variants of packs for different channel partners. It’s easy to create a self-fulfilling program.
For our optical client, Essilor, using Amazon vouchers removed the need to send back physical coupons. Saving the company time manually fulfilling claimed vouchers. Instead, through Amazon, our client handled this process digitally, and the partner instantly claimed the reward.
3 – 360-degree real-time view
Quickly identify and track your most loyal customers with an always-on dashboard. As interactivity is instant, view engagement metrics in real-time. Evaluate the success of a campaign at a glance, in minutes, not hours or days.
4 – Pivot your campaign at anytime
Rewards campaign not delivering the results you want? When your rewards program lives in a digital world, it’s far easier and faster, to A/B test, modify, edit, or update your program at any point while it’s live.
5 – Deliver personalized customer experiences
Program data is available at any time, enabling you to measure the effectiveness and uptake over time and by the individual customer. Data will allow you to personalize the experience based on engagement more deeply. For example, if you find one customer prefers Amazon vouchers over restaurant vouchers, you can update to only offer Amazon vouchers, or increase the value slightly.
6 – Build-in an onboarding process
Once a customer lands on your digital incentive page to redeem or check the status of an incentive – you can direct them to other essential resources such as sales packs, onboarding for newly launched products, as well as announcements, or congratulate them for their success.
7 – Plugin and play
Digitizing your rewards program is an easy, and fast way to enhance your relationship with your channel partners. 3radical’s plugin and play solution is quick to set up.
8 – The ability to gather Earned Data
By building out a digital rewards experience, you naturally build in an opportunity to find out more about your partners. For example, you can offer additional incentives in exchange for more information. For example, you might find out how you can better serve the partner, their favorite products, or what they’d like to see more or less of. You can quickly build out a deeper picture of your partner by adding this additional layer, allowing for deeper personalization.
As Essilor has experienced, an easy-to-use B2B incentive program will increase engagement with your customer and bring your customer relationships into focus by further building trust and transparency. If you have a manual incentive or reward program that you’d like to digitize – reach out – we’d love to hear from you and show you how quickly we can help.