5 B2B Customer Loyalty trends
Importance of continuing customer relations
Considering the complexity of business to business(B2B) client engagements, maintaining high-value relations remains a prime focus area for every business.
A well-structured client engagement allows you to streamline the daily client tasks and drive business excellence. It also helps in achieving a higher client retention rate and build a loyal clientele.
Now, how do I strengthen my business-client relations?
A robust B2B loyalty program needs to be in place to strengthen the client relationships. It must provide the B2B clients the desired level of recognition for their long-term partnership with you.
Businesses will have a significant impact on its revenue for a lost customer in the B2B segment. The services or product offerings come with a heftier price tag when compared to B2C.
Gallup Survey Insights: A Gallup survey indicates that B2B customers with a high customer engagement score achieve a higher revenue (50%), profitability (34%) and share of wallet (55%) to the businesses.
It supports the fact that formulating an effective loyalty program is key to business success in today’s world.
Here are five key trends to consider for redesigning your B2B loyalty program for not losing out any potential client.
Five customer loyalty trends for B2B companies
Social Recognition
The brand recognizes clients for their efforts of supporting and standing by the brand.
Businesses are conducting certification and skill development programs. It benefits both business and the client in their daily business operations.
These certification programs help in establishing a more robust business relation. It motivates clients to stay longer with you.
Upon completion of the course, clients get awarded with badges. For social recognition and visibility, various digital platforms are used to share the award success by the business and client. Thereby, building social engagements too apart from business commitments.
IBM digital credential is a great example of Social Recognition. It is one of the most valued social awards in the IT industry.
The award recognizes and authenticates the knowledge and skills necessary to remain relevant in today’s constantly changing IT environment.
It is a great way to build trust and authority among your clients and around your professional networks of other employers, social groups, etc.
Gamification
The digital world is providing businesses with immense opportunities to connect to the social audience.
Brands are introducing content marketing materials for clients like eLearning, online courses, webinars, etc.
It helps to educate and update clients with the latest product updates and tutorials for simpler comprehension of their product and services.
Gamification of contents would grab viewers’ attention more than a simple plain text, or image-based content will do.
Brand quizzes, customer experience surveys, social media campaigns, infographics would help in building a strong engagement with the clients in today’s world.
Dropbox is an excellent example of gamification of contents, to start, it takes the user through a series of tutorial. Upon successful completion rewards extra space as storage.
This simple marketing effort drives motivation among users to complete those levels for the incentive received. Thereby, retaining users and driving more new users to the network.
Co-marketing
Fine-tune your marketing messages by including the client’s perspectives. Include their expectations about the product and services. Conduct focus group interviews and discussions with the key decision makers from the client side. It would provide a holistic picture of the target market.
Identify their expectations and preference and channelize marketing activities accordingly.
Co-marketing helps in achieving a stronger engagement with your target audience. It will be a much relevant and intensive brand communication. It will stimulate your customers to stay with the brand longer.
Partner programs
Partnering with clients and conducting product and software training for clients. It will improve the quality of the projects and is a strong way to create a loyal client base.
The purview of partner programs includes partnering with other businesses to offer customers relevant products and services. It also enables product bundling capabilities and greater value-for-money to the customers.
Referral partner programs is another great way of servicing more customers.
It works through partnering with another business. When a customer need arises for your product, the business passes on that lead to you for subsequent sales and lead nurturing.
Buzinessware’s customer referral is an apt example for a referral partner program of this type.
Buzinessware runs a Cloud Referral Program for their cloud business.
Users can invite their friends to promote Buzinesswares virtual servers and web hosting from anywhere online. It drives social engagement around its target audience. It enhances subscriptions to their service in return.
Reward System
B2B reward system helps businesses reduce customer churn. Business customer mostly engages in high-value deals, long-term contracts, and ongoing subscriptions. Hence, incentives and reward system that recognize customers continuing engagement strengthens the business relations.
Referral rewards are the most powerful B2B reward system. As it is the voice-of-the-customer. In B2B scenario referral customers is as an extension of your sales team driving business to you.
Incentivize these customers with exclusive memberships, promotional offers, paid sponsorship for trade shows and retreat trips.
Acknowledge their continuing stay with your brand. It would lead to reducing existing customers churning out from your business ecosystem. It will help in adding new customers to your sales funnel.
Loyalty measurement
Using metrics like the Net Promoter score and customer lifetime value.
It helps in understanding customer perceptions, behavior and satisfaction level.
Business can leverage their customer data from their CRM systems to measure customer loyalty. Establishing a loyal customer base helps in achieving higher business growth through customer retention and come-back purchases.
The success of a B2B loyalty program also depends on a multitude of other factors. Some of them are the longer buying cycle, fewer opportunities for customers to become repeat purchasers, etc.
Hence, along with the trends indicated here, a well-built CRM system will support the loyalty program functioning.
It provides meaningful insights into customer satisfaction and current engagement levels. It will help businesses in building a robust B2B loyalty program that enhances brand advocacy and drives long lasting business relationships.
Looking for implementing a CRM system or rolling-out a loyalty program for your brand. Get in touch with our CRM and Loyalty Specialists.