‘Double dipping’ coalition programs have been popular in B2C loyalty programs for some time – how many of us have paid for a flight on a credit card and earned air miles for both transactions?

From a business perspective, coalition programs offer these key benefits:

Have you ever wondered why points are used in a loyalty program, and how many points should you award your B2B loyalty program participants?

Check out our Five Point Plan for setting the value of a reward point:

A term that we commonly use in channel loyalty and incentive programs is the effort advantage ratio. This is the study of consumer loyalty programs and the effort a participant must undertake to achieve a loyalty program reward and how this effort impacted on attractiveness of the loyalty program for their continued participation. 

These are 7 things to consider when weighing up the Effort Advantage Ratio.

Is a loyalty program right for your business?

Like any marketing strategy, loyalty programs have a place and an ideal environment in which they should be deployed and managed. So, it is important for firms to undertake a detailed diagnostic assessment to see whether a loyalty program is the best marketing strategy for their product or service, as opposed to rushing to set up a program in the hope that it will solve all your business challenges. 

Here are 3 reasons why a loyalty program may not be right for your product or industry:

Try these 3 tactics to accelerate the journey from enrollment to engagement in your loyalty program and thus minimize the period that a newly enrolled participant spends in the chasm of disengagement and go into "Walking Dead" status. 

Today’s program managers are conceding that the constant desire for global standardization has reached an inflection point where there still needs to be a high level of local customization. This is despite procurement and finance departments thinking that even more efficiencies can be derived from global program operations resulting in year on year cost savings.

Whilst a lot of time and money is spent creating brand and positioning, little effort is spent on developing the “loyalty avatar” that will be used to communicate to  program participants, both formally and informally.

It seems that the 2018 obituary for offline communications and tactics in loyalty and channel incentives programs has been premature. Indeed, we have seen an increase in program sponsors allocating budgets to offline executions during the first eight months of 2018, signaling a retreat from the sole reliance on digital communications.

One of the growing challenges facing all loyalty practitioners is how to drive higher levels of engagement. Traditional methods such as bonus points and bespoke communications, whilst still effective, are losing their impact, particularly when competitor loyalty programs are also engaging in these tactics.

Motivforce has topped off the first half of 2018 by winning three prestigious accolades in the B2B loyalty marketing industry in recognition of its pioneering channel incentive programs, Know Your IBM and Lenovo LEAP.

Motivforce is in line for a host of accolades over the next few months as we’ve been shortlisted for three high profile awards programs with our clients IBM, Lenovo and Celebrity Cruises.

Just in case you might have missed it; a wind of change has started to blow in the loyalty marketing landscape. In Europe the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is about to go live and it marks a heightened privacy consciousness among businesses and their customers. And ultimately, we expect that the principles of GDPR will go global.

Even if you are not operating from the EU, it is not a bad idea to start reflecting on what the new model of data protection will mean for you and your program. Almost certainly, the bar will be raised and your program members will expect you to take your protection of their data to a whole new level.

So, are you GDPR ready? Read on

The development of online education modules continues to be a growth market for Motivforce. While we keep expanding our enablement portfolio with some of our accounts in conjunction with the latest social loyalty tools (such as gamification), others are simply all about business partner learning. We often get asked to come up with a convincing business case that outlines how clients will start earning by learning.

We think there are four key benefits, all with direct important bottom-line implications. 

Loyalty and incentive programs are powerful tools. Used effectively they can generate habitual behavioral loyalty, increase sales revenue, decrease customer churn, increase share of wallet and limit variety-seeking behavior.  Many of these results have been empirically tested in academic research and in award winning case studies.

The future of loyalty programs is mobile. This mantra has been reiterated across many loyalty marketing industry trend reports. It is a mantra that clearly has face value. In fact, it is a no-brainer, as much of our life now revolves around our little handhelds. Most loyalty programs are migrating to mobile platforms, allowing their members instant access any place, any time. Being able to check your points balance, the latest reward additions or quickly swiping through a learning module in a client’s parking lot definitely ups the convenience factor. But, it does not guarantee an engaging mobile program experience. That is why a number of forward-looking brands have started to engage their members by inviting them to share their ‘must-share-moments’ with the brand and explore the face value of the mobile camera.

Over the past 20 years, the structure of B2B loyalty programs has grown from simple sales incentives that reward for achieving sales targets to rewarding for profile performance.  Profile performance is the concept of creating the ideal participant profile and rewarding for all behaviours that a participant demonstrates in adopting this profile.

There are many variables to consider when creating the ideal channel loyalty program participant profile and these are broadly classified into the following 5 types of loyalty program participant profiles:

Our research has shown greater loyalty (measured by sales and other valued added behaviours) amongst program participants who are active in enablement tasks, compared to those who are not.  In looking at correlations between those participants who have undertaken enablement tasks, versus those who have not, we have observed three traits....

Are you thinking; "do enablement & incentive programs build loyalty with Channel partners and resellers?" 

If so then here are some key questions to consider if you're thinking about launching a B2B Loyalty Program or even how to re-engineer an existing one

Many loyalty and incentives programs have built status tiers to segment and reward their most active, profitable, engaged and loyal participants.

However there are a number of pit falls that destroy the integrity and motivational pull of loyalty programs if the tier strategy is not properly planned. Here are our 5 tactics to manage downgrading participant tier status...

Motivforce recently undertook a study looking at the most appropriate and effective way to respond to a B2B Loyalty Program participant’s feedback – particularly in the social media environment but with direct implications to contained environments. The results revealed that the most effective response is when help desk employees put themselves in the shoes of the customer before they respond.