Driving Downtime

As Covid-19 continues to create chaotic and challenging business condition’s many industry sectors have seen a collapse in sales and huge downturns in trading. Lack of sales is like a horror movie for all businesses. And if your company has a loyalty program, how can you maintain participant engagement, when the core concept of rewarding for sales has been eliminated?

The answer is to use this downtime as an opportunity. It is absolutely critical during this period that we ramp up our efforts to increase engagement with participants to ensure the program is relevant, front of mind and in a prime position to capitalise on the increase in demand when the Covid-19 crisis has passed.

Look to pivot your offering

Companies are all in the same boat as their competitors. Those who use this time to reimagine, innovate and inspire will be in a position to thrive as they emerge from this strangest of times. Seize the opportunity. We can see this being implemented by airlines, for example. Whilst their fleets are grounded, there has been a marked increase in Frequent Flyer activity aimed at rewarding program members for non-flying activity via coalition partners, while their core product is offline.

In B2B loyalty programs, this period can be spent productively by encouraging participants to undertake value-added, non-sales behaviours, thus maintaining vital engagement and brand awareness.

Our five key areas to consider:

1.     Education and enablement

With many channel partners having excess time on their hands now is the time to encourage and reward them for developing their product knowledge, sales skills, compliance and certifications. Distance learning via short online education modules, quizzes and videos are extremely effective in upskilling your resellers and business partners, ensuring that you remain at the forefront of their choice set when demand returns. In fact our research has indicated that completing education-based tasks has better brand and product recall and longer trailing effects than tactical advertising executions. At Motivforce, we have seen this result with our award winning Know You IBM Program.

2.     Reward steps to the sale

During normal non-crisis business cycles, many vendors and program sponsors have a desire to understand the potential pipeline of business through their channel and to see where conversion and non-conversion occurs. This helps many to adjust their product and go to market strategy. During periods of soft or non-existent demand, we see a number of program sponsors encouraging and rewarding their participants to enter opportunities and leads into their CRM systems such as salesforce.com. Bonus points are often paid when the lead that is registered in the CRM system is converted to a sale.

3.     Refer a friend and recruitment

In periods of soft demand, many program participants are motivated by earning points for non sales activities and one of the most effective is recruitment via refer a friend.  Refer a friend typically works where the referee receives points when they recruit a ‘friend’ who undertakes a point earning activity (e.g. makes a sale, completes a training course, places and order etc). These types of campaigns have proven effective as participants will often refer colleagues whom they believe have the greatest chance to engage in the program and hence trigger bonus points. The Lenovo LEAP program has recently experienced a high level of success with a recent refer a friend program.

4.     Gamification and social (virtual interactions)

Interconnectivity and interactions between program participants via business games have proven to be a key driver of engagement and behaviour. Leader boards for non-business activities such as testimonials, blogs and contests have proven to be popular whist keeping participants engaged with the program.

5.     Research and Survey

This is the perfect time to launch some serious research into the attitudes, perceptions and motivations to gain deeper insights into your program participants and how these insights can help fine-tune your programme. Indeed some research activities require up to 30-40 mins of a participant’s time and hence, during softening demand, these participants have ample time to engage fully in your program, research activities, where they earn points for completing the surveys or participating in experiments. Research allows you to answer some of the questions associated with your data.

Prepare to become stronger

B2B loyalty programs are a powerful platform and they deliver their best ROI when worked hard in all business cycles - you will be surprised what other benefits they can deliver. When the demand returns, and return it will, businesses need to ensure that they have a strong and engaged channel, that is clear in its focus of what products to sell and what brands to prioritise. Those companies that take time now to invest and structure their loyalty programs, will be in the strongest position to grow sales.