At Power2Motivate, we understand exactly how to make your most precious customers feel valued. Follow these customer loyalty programme best practices.
True customer loyalty (someone that will keep on coming back to you, even if they can get a cheaper deal elsewhere) is incredibly hard to find. It's therefore important you encourage these customers to return to you business with a loyalty programme. But there are bad and good loyalty programmes - and the bad ones can end up negatively impacting a customer relationship even more than if you had no programme in place at all. That's why we've created this list of best practices for setting up your B2B customer loyalty scheme.
1) Don't be stingy
We've all signed up to a loyalty programme that sounds like a great deal, until you realise you have to spend huge amounts of money even to get the most miniscule of prizes. You don't want to get a reputation for being stingy, especially in a B2B setting where customers can take much longer to win round - you may end up putting them off your brand altogether.
Ensure you're putting enough funding into your programme so that your most valuable customers feel just that - valued. If you've put enough effort into calculating what return on investment (ROI) you want, you should still get the results you were looking for.
2) Use a range of metrics
When calculating ROI, don't dwell solely on customer spend. This is of course important, however total spend isn't necessarily indicative of a loyal client. Someone might spend a lot in one go with your company, only to never return to you again. In addition to revenue, consider rewarding:
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Customer lifetime - the number of months of years they have regularly bought from you.
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Repeat customer rate - the number of times a customer has given you repeat business.
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Net promoter score - how often your customers are referring you to others.
These metrics are all important indicators of whether a customer is truly loyal, and matter just as much as the amount they are spending.
3) Communicate regularly
There's no point having a loyalty scheme if your customers don't know it exists. Make sure you have a comprehensive communications plan in place when you first create your programme to spread awareness initially, and then continue to provide updates to customers on their progress and any changes that you're making to the system.
There's no point having a loyalty scheme if your customers don't know it exists.
Likewise, it's essential your customers understand the loyalty programme in the first place, so make sure you're providing learning materials and demos on how to log points and win rewards. Your customers won't appreciate it if they know there are prizes to win but don't understand how to use the scheme.
4) Use a points system
One way to make your programme easy to understand is to use a points system. This way, customers can win a specific number of points for completing certain actions, and these points will add up to a reward. You can then offer promotions from time to time that offer double points for particular behaviours you want to encourage at a specific period. For example, you could double points for customers that request a demo on a new product you've recently launched and want to raise awareness in.
Using points also means customers can spend these on a reward of their choice, rather than having to receive set prizes. As you will work with a diverse range of customers, this choice is essential - they are all different, so they will want different rewards also.
B2B Customer Loyalty Programmes with Power2Motivate
Here at Power2Motivate, we understand exactly what makes people tick. That's why we offer a range of effective customer loyalty programmes, all entirely customisable to your specific needs and goals. For more information, contact us today or request a demo.