The term loyalty itself means quality or state of being loyal or a feeling of strong support for someone or something. When it comes to Channel Loyalty, It can be understood as a process focused on transforming the relationship between a brand and its trade partners from a purely transactional one to a long-term, emotional connection. It is considered a critical sales pillar and a crucial element in the growth strategy of the business.

LoyaltyXpert considers this to be an increasingly critical factor for a brand to succeed in a competitive market. In addition to this, some of the most important factors in developing channel loyalty are.

• Implementation of value-driven loyalty schemes
• Personalized incentives
• Transparency between two-way communications
• Driving emotional connects through constant engagement and experiences

Channel Loyalty Program- Need of the Hour:

To create long-lasting and most importantly loyal relationships with your significant entities of your business, viz., influencers, resellers, stockists, dealers, and retail partners; it is recommended to move forward with an exceptional B2B loyalty program just like loyaltyXperts offer. As loyalty within the channel comes with a cost, one has to be quickly responsive with faster and better service delivery in order to top the experience that everyone else is offering. This ensures the survival of brands in a highly competitive and globalized economy.

It is crystal clear that multiple brands are having intense competition and so they strategize to grab maximum attention of distributors, influencers and retail partners.  To make this easier, LoyaltyXpert team is sharing three important tips for channel partner’s success through brand commitment-
• Enable partners with the knowledge to be successful
• Help partners develop demand and opportunities
• Motivate partners to see those opportunities through

Influence of Well-Strategized Channel Partner Loyalty Program:

The best part of executing strategized channel partner loyalty program is it unveils new sales and revenue opportunities. In addition to that it functions as a recruitment channel for new partners and increases overall distribution network. This motivates channel partners to sell products and services of the companies they are associated with.

Additionally, getting rewards from the supplier is another important factor for the distributors as they get opportunity to take part in their purchase decisions. This B2B loyalty program helps in elevating the relationship between a brand and its partner from that of a purely transactional one to one that of a long-term, emotional one.

As a result, this helps the brand to create reliable, long-term revenue. Along with that, it increases the brand mindshare amongst partners as well as your end consumer.

LoyaltyXpert’s Definite Strategies to Build Effective Channel Loyalty Program:

It is quite evident that depending on the target audience goals and expectation of particular audience, like- wholesaler, distributor, retailer and others; actual strategy varies on a greater extent. But still, there are some core strategies that can ensure success by integrating with loyalty program. Let us have a quick glance over that:

1. Sync with partner goals:

Formation of core strategy is the first step in successful implementation of channel loyalty program. One must ensure to classify their audience based on their goals and offer them unique, personalized goals and rewards. If in case it doesn’t sync successfully with the partners’ strategic goals then adoption and redemption will suffer.

     2. Organize meet-up events regularly:

Regular meeting and engaging with the partners is another most important factor behind building effective channel loyalty program. Make constant efforts to organize localized events and meet/greet sessions where one can communicate with individual partners. With the two-way discussions, one can explore different angles of their business along with building long lasting relationship with the trusted partners and ensuring lower marketing costs.

     3. Gain trust with reward redemption:

It is advisable to make it easy for the partners to redeem their rewards in the form of a holiday or a gift card or just an appliance. This has become necessary as to avoid any kind of loss of interest in your program. Best way to do this is through ecommerce website or a mobile app, where the partners can login and choose from multiple incentives in a single platform.

    4. Offering incentives based on different criteria:

There are tier-based different criteria and offering incentives on their basis have been proved to be really successful in the B2C context. The same applies for the business partners as well. This structure basically aligns with the aspirational mindset that is core to human behavior.  Starting right from the base tier for signups, gradually you can avail them with higher incentive offerings. This can be measured as the partner moves up the tier based on their sales and purchase volumes.

   5. Personalization and segmentation:

It is quite obvious that no two partner’s goals and motivations are exact same and so it becomes necessary to avail them with highly personalized goals and incentives. One has to be ensured of framing clear rule structures for each partner based on their behavior that consistently produces business results. Also, the personalization aspect should also flow through the communication strategy.

   6. Leveraging gamification:

Popular gamifiation concepts like Engagement Trackers, Leaderboards, Spinwheels as well as sporting events and other such related activities can help boost engagement levels of your loyalty program. In order to make sure that the gamification concept is going to be successful, it is important to ensure that it syncs with the user journey, the business goals, as well as communicated clearly to the partners through multiple channels like emailers, app notifications, SMS and sales visits.
Thus, this is how different by adopting different strategies you can make out most from the Channel Loyalty programs. Contact us for more to learn about channel loyalty programs!