Opening a business is not an easy task. Many things go into opening a business, like capital investment, market research, money management, etc. Not everyone can run a successful business enterprise as it takes a lot of effort to make it successful. One of the most critical factors that lead to the success of a business is a B2B loyalty program.
Customers are crucial for a business as the profits earned by a business are directly related to the services bought by the customers. Over the years, companies worldwide have been trying to find a way to maximize their customer retention. One of the ways to do that is through B2B loyalty programs.
What is a B2B Loyalty Program?
B2B loyalty programs can be defined as a customer retention solution focusing on designing loyalty logic and specific features. These features will help a business to form brand loyalty with the business they sell to.
The B2B eCommerce market is expected to reach $1.8 trillion by 2023. This has encouraged companies to form B2B loyalty programs to ensure that the existing contacts stay loyal, engaged, and completely satisfied.
Thomas Christensen, Program lead of strategic Client Programs, said, “A consistently good member experience should never be overlooked in achieving repeat purchases. Combining this with more personalized experiences makes customers much more likely to repeat purchases with any brand. The technology that enables you to deliver the right offer at the right time to the right customer is crucial.”
Some of the Best B2B Loyalty Program Examples
Here are some of the best B2B loyalty service examples–
1. Lenovo
One of the world’s largest and most well-liked electronic manufacturers globally, Lenovo is one of the best examples of a successful B2B loyalty program. Lenovo repurchased IBM’s X86 server division in 2014. IBM was hesitant to sell at first. It built an amazing loyalty program with the help of Motivforce Marketing and incentives. Lenovo created an Expert Achievers program that helped business partners earn points for completing two educational modules on servers. When starting, Lenovo aimed to persuade 500 firms to join; over 700 firms joined them, and the loyalty program participants sold seven times more products than the previous year.
Lenovo expected a target of $170 million, and the company earned over $238 million.
2. Celebrity Cruises
Celebrity Cruises developed one of the most effective loyalty programs to stand out amongst the opposition. As most of the income in the company is generated through travel, the company decided to give incentives to the best travel agents for their loyalty. Agents were given services to view their points in a user-friendly portal, allowing them to claim their booking sales.
The campaign ran for a total of three months, and it allowed agents to earn up to $689 in reward. As a result, over 12000 agents joined the loyalty program, increasing its revenue by 13 percent.
3. TRW Aftermarket
TRW designed one of the most successful loyalty programs known as Automotive Diamonds. The main problem businesses were facing was that they could not directly communicate with their aftermarkets because the TRW industry had many competitors. To solve this problem, TRW created its loyalty program.
The company connected workshops all over Europe. Workshops could earn money by signing in and earn points by purchasing members’ products and can redeem those points to get a reward of their choosing. TRW used data stored in the different workshops to customize their loyalty program according to their wants and needs.
What does a B2B Loyalty Program Case Study Suggest?
There have been many case studies when it comes to the B2B loyalty programs. The main purpose of these studies is-
- To identify the business opportunities that are present in the market through research and analysis.
- Identify the challenges that will be faced by the company while implementing a B2B loyalty program.
- What will be the solution to the challenges mentioned above, and how will the company overcome those challenges.
- The outcome of the loyalty program will evaluate how successfully the company has implemented the loyalty program and do they have a positive or a negative impact.
These case studies can help a company implement the B2B loyalty program best services, which will help them have a good relationship with other firms or agents and achieve their organizational goals.
Some Effective Ways to Build B2B Loyalty Program
Here are some effective ways to build a successful B2B loyalty Program –
1. Providing transaction-based accounts
Providing discounts is one of the most popular techniques used by businesses all around the world. It helps both the customer and the business, i.e. customers get more value for their money, and businesses to get to attract more customers through discounts.
Some of the most important advantages of implementing this technique are-
- Increase in sales
- Lower down the business cost
- Improves the reputation of the business
- Helps to attract new repeat customers
2. Implementing tier incentives
Companies can provide tier incentives to their customers, which can serve as an attractive opportunity. Various strategies are implemented for tier incentives. One of the most popular is persuading the consumers to sign up for their services and providing them with different tier services.
3. Arranging members events
Companies arrange B2B events that focus on real-life interactions. These events teach customer retention, how to handle face-to-face conversation, how to sustain a long-term partnership with other companies, etc. This interaction helps to make new contacts and maintain loyalty with old contacts.
Conclusion
As the times have changed, companies worldwide are trying to come up with new and exciting business modules that help them stay competitive for a long amount of time. The consumer market is ever-evolving, so the companies always have to chop and change to stay relevant. B2B loyalty programs are one of the most effective and successful programs if appropriately implemented.
It can give a business a first-mover advantage which can open up the opportunity to pursue some new ventures. It will be interesting to see how many companies implement different programs successfully in the future.
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