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An incentive marketing strategy is usually very simple: “buy this item or take this action and we’ll give you something.” Incentive marketing has been around for as long as businesses have tried to sell their products to customers or motivate employees to do certain things or reach specific goals.
Because this arrangement is performance based (if there is no purchase or action, there is no incentive awarded), marketers prefer the transparency of the transaction relative to other types of marketing campaigns, such as paid advertising, social media or public relations.
It is easy to measure the incentive’s ROI, which should always benefit the marketer – assuming the incentive’s value or cost is much smaller than the margin realized by the customer purchase or employee action.
The short answer is, absolutely!
The more informed answer is, loyalty programs are incentive programs on steroids – or at least, they should be.
As mentioned above, many incentive programs are very simple interactions: “buy-get” or “do-get.” Seldom do businesses take full advantage of historical customer data to drive sales, resulting in lost opportunities. This is where a loyalty reward program, whether B2B or B2C, can make a huge difference. A reward program offers the same type of transparent performance but leverages historical sales data to make the incentive ROI much, much greater for the company using the program. It doesn’t matter what sort of relationship is being targeted; a reward incentive program that uses data to identify purchase behavior insights, should provide much richer results.
That being said, the type of data available to drive the reward incentive program will vary by type of company offering the program:
Manufacturer Reward Programs – Manufacturers will have different data available depending on how they go to market. If they use distributors or retailers to sell to the downstream customer (such as a retail store owner or a consumer), the manufacturer probably doesn’t know who the downstream customer is, so they have limited options. With a loyalty program they can:
Distributors & Wholesalers – Distributors typically have the most robust transactional data; they know who bought what, when and for how much. As such, they have a lot of reward options. They can:
Incentives can be created for any sort of general or strategic sales goal the organization has. Regardless of the type of program or the target audience, the process to develop a loyalty program is generally the same:
A reward program is supposed to be a profit center for the business offering the program. It’s a sales tool with performance-based costs – if you are rewarding customers or sales reps, the business is also being rewarded, through delivery on the sales goals;
So, while an incentive marketing program may reward a customer or sales rep for meeting a particular sales target or goal, a loyalty program rewards your target audience for every purchase and leverages their historical sales data to ensure the incentive ROI benefits the company in more ways than one.
Are you looking for new ways to incentivize your customers? Lift & Shift can help.
This article is part of a series covering how growth-based loyalty programs can elevate sales and company profits by incentivizing current customers to spend more, attracting new customers with appealing rewards, and motivating your sales team.
If you'd like to learn more about B2B Loyalty Programs, then please read the next article in the series:
"How Rewards & Incentives
are used in B2B Marketing".
For an overview of all articles in the series, please visit our resource page "The Ultimate Guide to B2B Loyalty Programs".
Lift & Shift offers a powerful B2B reward platform that can help your company leverage its sales data to drive incremental purchases with customers and channel partners or motivate sales staff. We work with manufacturers, distributors and service providers to analyze sales data, identifying purchasing gaps and other valuable targeting opportunities.
We create and deliver highly relevant offers to customers, in-house sales staff or sales associates, motivating your target audience to respond, using a wide array of appealing reward options as influencers. Our performance-based reward structures deliver an unparalleled return on investment, with absolutely no wasted budget.
Our customizable reward platform enables clients to easily benefit from a robust loyalty reward program. It's affordable and includes Lift & Shift’s turnkey professional program administration. We take care of everything so you can focus on your key initiatives.
Looking to create or
improve your program?
We can help!