Your loyalty rewards program is a reflection of your brand. Even if you totally outsource management, design, and administration of your B2B loyalty program, at the end of the day, the participant experience comes back on you.
If your loyalty rewards program emails look old and outdated, your participants will associate that with your brand. If your loyalty rewards program website is hard to navigate or poorly designed, your participants will associate that with your brand. If customer support for the reward redemption process is slow or nonexistent, your participants will associate that with your brand.
By the same token, if your loyalty rewards program communication is relevant and memorable, if reward redemption is smooth and fast, if your website and platforms are easy-to-use and well-thought-out, your participants will associate all of those positive qualities with your brand.
Today, we’ll be looking at several things you can do to maximize the effectiveness of your incentive loyalty marketing and protect the integrity of your brand.
Create a Seamless User Experience
The best loyalty programs provide a seamless user experience, where interacting with your company, receiving reward points, and reward redemption feel like a continuous, uninterrupted process.
In this regard, there are several things to keep in mind when designing your loyalty rewards program:
- Your customers should be able to easily access your loyalty rewards program 24/7, regardless of their device. (Website integration and single sign-on can definitely help your program feel more accessible).
- Your loyalty rewards program website should look and feel like your other sites or any outbound communication.
- Your loyalty rewards program website should be easy to navigate and provide a B2C-esque reward redemption experience that your customers are already familiar with.
- Your reward points should assign quickly. Reward redemption should be fast.
- You should utilize omnichannel communication to keep your customers up-to-speed on the latest promotions.
Brand All Site Content & Collateral
Even the best loyalty rewards program experience won’t do much good if you’re participants aren’t constantly reminded who is rewarding them. While providing a seamless customer experience will help build this association, brand everything. Incorporate your mission statement, your tagline, your slogan, and display your logo proudly.
If you are working with an incentive management company, make sure to work with their designers to make sure that all website content and collateral is on-brand. This includes:
- All outgoing correspondence (via direct mail or online).
- Online quizzes, surveys, or trivia.
- Your mobile app (if applicable).
- Your reward redemption invoices.
Additionally, coming up with a catchy name or custom logo for your loyalty rewards program that ties in with your brand will help to keep your program top-of-mind.
Don’t Be Generic
On that note, don’t be generic! The average American belongs to 13.4 loyalty programs and are only active in about half of them. Make sure yours stands out!
Whether that’s creative custom communications, engaging incentive technology platforms, or offering a great selection of millions of online rewards, you have to differentiate your loyalty rewards program.
In order to be effective, a B2B loyalty program has to feel personalized. Do you know what the opposite of personalized is? You guess it – generic. Don’t be generic.
Get the Most Out of Every Each Touchpoint
One of the cool things about a loyalty rewards program, especially from a marketing perspective, is that it gives you new touchpoints and opportunities for brand interactions with an engaged audience. You can’t ask for more than that!
So make the most of it. Have some exciting news about your company? Share it in your loyalty program emails. Launch a new product? Create an incentive marketing promotion around that product to build awareness and begin capturing market share. Struggling to differentiate yourself from your competition? Create some point-based online quizzes that educate participants on the values of your brand and on the quality of your products or services.
Provide Ongoing Participant Support
If your participants have questions about navigating your website or about items in your reward catalog, who do they call? If they aren’t 100% happy with their reward redemption experience, is someone on standby to help them make it right?
Few things are worse than when B2B customers participate in your loyalty rewards program, do everything they were supposed to do, and then you drop the ball on your end. Doing so can permanently damage your brand or your customer relationships – the opposite of what you would hope your loyalty rewards program would inspire.
If you’re planning to keep your loyalty program management in-house, do you have the staff and necessary manhours to provide this kind of support? If not, it might be wise to rethink your options. If you’re working with an incentive management company, ask to see their metrics about participant satisfaction, response times, and ticket resolution percentages. If they can’t or won’t provide you with that information, run!
Offer Great Rewards
One of the benefits of noncash rewards is that they create a memorable, emotional impact. Make sure yours have value, feel personalized, and make it feel like your participants’ efforts was worth it. No one wants their brand to be connected with bland, boring, cheap, impersonal rewards.
Additionally, the larger the selection of rewards you offer, the more personalized they’ll feel and the more eager your audience will be to participate in your customer loyalty rewards program.
Take the Next Step
If you’re interested in learning more about loyalty rewards programs that are exciting, effective, and always on-brand, give us a call at (866) 567-7432. We’d love to learn more about your brand and how we can make that shine through your rewards program.
Til next time,
Nichole Gunn
