Comarch: B2B Loyalty And Engagement Programs

Loyalty360 sat down with Radoslaw Zep, Loyalty Product Manager at Comarch.

What are some of the main objectives and personalized benefits that a B2B loyalty program should include?
While establishing the strategy for the company, you need to make sure that the main objectives are included and integrated in the plan. Otherwise, the loyalty program might not be as successful as you expect. Apart from obvious goals like increasing business profitability and gaining more brand loyalty from business partners, you can also achieve much more: education and brand awareness, positive customer experience, increased customer retention and loyalty.

What are the challenges that B2B marketing executives face today?
As far as B2B loyalty programs are concerned, we can point out four main challenges.  The complexity of B2B landscape with fragmented route-to-market landscape, high concentration of buyers within one distribution channel and business relations that are influenced by various factors. The next issue is the integration of communication and sales channels which can improve data-sharing processes as well as business partnerships. Having said that, gaining control over customer experience seems to be troublesome as well. Companies fail to understand customers’ needs and provide them with easy interaction and proactive approach. Finally, a lot of B2B companies neglect switching focus from acquisition to retention activities. It’s a shame, because properly conducted customer retention activities can result in more customer-centric approach and improvement in customer relations.

What are some of the dynamic changes in today’s B2B environment?
It’s a high time for marketers to realize that current B2B environment doesn’t work like it used to. The product is not your main asset anymore – customers can easily turn to your competition to find similar products or services. The most noticeable change is the switch to customer relationship approach. Your clients want to be treated as individuals and receive offers adjusted to their needs.  B2B loyalty programs really help to achieve satisfactory benefits both to you and your client. Long-term relationships boost loyalty and engagement, and in effect, bring your company more profits.

In the past, the most important motivation for any B2B engagement program was achieving fixed KPIs, mostly sales of a specific product. When the program finished, results were analysed and another campaign started. Unfortunately that resulted in many decentralized, disconnected and shot-term programs, that didn’t work as a whole. Nowadays, it is important to integrate all elements of trade programs and learn about their influence on the campaign as a whole. 

What is being done well with B2B loyalty programs and where do they fall short?
Well implemented B2B loyalty program will definitely boost your customer retention (it’s cheaper to invest in loyal customer, than constantly acquire new ones) and gives you opportunity to collect valuable data about your customers which can be used to cross-sell and up-sell.

Unfortunately, B2B loyalty programs are not suitable for every business, which is probably the biggest flaw. Apart from that, you need to be really creative to come up with loyalty program that is not offered by you competitors. It’s better to trust professionals to suggest and implement appropriate platform.

According to the whitepaper, B2B loyalty programs are not for all industries. Which industries benefit the most from a B2B loyalty program and why?
Just to name a few: travel, airlines, airports, HoReCa, retail, automotive, fashion, cosmetics and many, many more. One of the factors is the frequency of use. To put it simple: employees working internationally for company X have to fly several times a month, rent cars, sleep in hotels, eat in restaurants, etc. The company X will chose an airline, hotel or car rental which offers the best deals and reward it for frequent use of products and services.

Throughout years, we’ve learned that implementing a B2B loyalty program proves the most effective for companies operating in one of three types of downstream value chain environments: over-regulated, highly liberalized environment, competition-driven environment.

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