How Businesses Are Using Rewards to Drive Brand Stretch

Loyalty promotions are one simple way to drive brand stretch, but there are other ways that can empower your sales team, at the same time as delivering significant revenue growth.

Not all customers will purchase all your products, and being able to identify which customers are most likely to buy which product or service is key to driving brand stretch.

You need to be able to visualise the negatives, and by this we mean the ability to see the products which customers aren’t buying from you, and thus are probably buying from your competitors. Where you have product workflows or procedures, it is easier to identify which products sit together and should be being purchased. If you are a service-based company you could identify which services customers might buy, based on their size, number of staff, requirements, market sector etc.

We would highly recommend spending some time really thinking this through and creating a range of linked products and services so that, as part of a daily reporting routine, you can identify new products that you could be recommending to your customers.

Create a visualisation of the product groups for each customer and highlight which products they haven't yet tried. Make this visualisation available to everyone who interacts with your customer base.

Promotion Ideas:

Idea 1: When a customer buys a product within their specific group, they get the chance to choose one of the products that they haven't yet tried for free.

Idea 2: Give customers the ability to purchase the target products at a discount for the first and second time that they order them.

Idea 3: Give customers the ability to earn points to redeem against other products, and offer the target products at a 50% discount.

Idea 4: Give your sales teams the ability to offer personal promotions against those products.


How to use the data to drive brand stretch?

There are a number of steps that you need to take to drive this type of activation campaign:

Step 1: Create a report that shows which products a customer isn't buying from specific workflows.

Step 2: Segment your customers by workflows, procedures or type of business. If your customer is a bathroom installer, then you know that they will need to purchase all of the products for a bathroom. There isn't any point in consistently marketing boilers to them.

Step 3: Create a visualisation of the data for each customer. This would have the most impact if it was made available online, and updated live based on purchasing activity.

Step 4: Make sure that your report and the visualisation is available to the people who are going to be talking to the customer.

Step 5: Incentivise your sales team to talk to the customer about the products that they aren't buying - a separate promotion, and a leaderboard designed to motivate your employees to get their customers purchasing a full product group, would definitely drive the right behaviour.

Step 6: Utilise one of the promotion ideas above to drive the behaviour with the customer.

Step 7: Keep checking on the data. You want to see a customer buying the product 3 or more times before you can take it as being an embedded behaviour change.

Case Study:

As part of a loyalty programme we designed for a dental manufacturer, we created a procedure-based reporting solution which identified the products that a customer wasn’t purchasing from the brand. Once it had identified the products, it then checked to see how many reward points the customer had in their account, and whether they had enough to redeem for one of the identified products. This information was then used as part of a set of automated email journeys and was given to the sales teams, so they could proactively demonstrate the new products to the customer.

76% of all customers who used their rewards to try a new product continued to purchase that product after their redemption.

Not only did this have a significant impact in generating higher share of wallet - and in turn market share; it also meant that the sales teams were being given data which empowered them to act. They had the right data, at the right time to be proactive.

Note: The loyalty programme used own brand products as the rewards.

About The Author

Stream’s co-founder, Melanie, became the first British woman to become accredited with the CLMP from The Loyalty Academy. Passionate about all things loyalty, Melanie cuts through the technical jargon and gets to the real business issue. Melanie loves to develop engaging digital solutions that appear simple whilst creating long lasting partnerships that add value to all.

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