1. Be specific with your goals
Of course all companies want their incentive program to generate sales, but what are your specific goals? How will you measure your program’s success? Before you start designing your sales incentive program, write down your key goals. Some examples could include:
- Achieve 25% sales growth year on year
- Increase average monthly customer spend on low performing product lines by 15%
- Increase sign-ups by 45% within 12 months
- Improve product knowledge to increase sell-out rates
Once you have identified your key goals, you can then design your incentive program to align and support your goals.
To help customers achieve their goals, we built a Journey Automation tool that nurtures customers toward program goals in real-time.
2. Are you using Microsoft Excel to calculate points?
Excel still gets used today to manually manage 1000s rows of sales data, apply formulas to calculate points, and rack-up countless hours rectifying mistakes putting companies at financial risk.
Instead, use an automated tool that can scale this process and literally save you hundreds of hours and mitigate any risks to your incentive program. Our team of engineers have designed a tool that does just that and more:
- Automatically load large amounts of sales data on a schedule
- Create multi faceted points rules to calculate points based on product SKUs, sale types and more
- Roll back both sales and point transactions with a click of a button
- Link point debits to credits for easy auditing over-time
3. If you’re out of sight you’re out of mind
The marketing and promotion of an incentive program is often overlooked. If you’re not regularly communicating with your customers once your program is live, they will forget to participate in your program.
Here are some tips you need to keep in mind.
- Automation, automation, automation! Trust us, this is your friend and will help you scale your marketing efforts. Marketing automation will allow you to interact with your customers in a meaningful way, for example, automatically sending an email when a customer reaches a point threshold, telling them about the amazing rewards they can redeem.
- Keep things fresh and run regular sales promotions targeting specific product lines, customer segments and geographical regions – this way customers get more ways to earn in your program.
By tailoring your marketing and promotions, you’ll get to see an increase in customer engagement and growth over time.
4. Is your program user friendly?
No one likes using a program that’s complicated or hard to understand. Make your program as intuitive and user friendly as possible for your customers. Think about a great B2C program you may be a member of? What features do you love? What would you do differently? While the B2B customer experience (CX) is still catching up with that of B2C, B2B programs can yield significant returns when designed with a strategic focus on CX.
- Ensure your program looks just as good on a mobile device as it does on a computer. Many customers use their phones more often than a computer so don’t lose out by having a program that is only computer friendly.
- Logging into your incentive program should never be a barrier for your customers. Using login tokens, customers can click a link in an email and instantly log into a program in seconds.
- Have a readily available channel to support your customers if and when they need it. That includes utilizing CRM software to respond to customer support requests.
- Personalize the content in your programs portal and in the emails you send. One simple personalization could be inserting your customers logo into the program website.
5. Collect valuable feedback
It’s amazing how many companies fail to set up feedback loops and miss out on valuable opportunities to learn and grow from their customers. How can you improve something if you don’t know what needs changing?
Here’s a few things Kademi customers are trained on when implementing feedback in a program.
- Drop sentiment feedback into all of your email templates – this can include emoticon faces, or a thumbs up, thumbs down, which instantly captures a customer’s feedback. If the feedback is negative, a task can be created in our CRM for a program manager to reach out to the customer.
- As soon as a key milestone is met, ask your customers what they think! For example, a customer might hit their quality sales target, be awarded points and then order a gift. In this scenario you want an immediate automated email to be sent, to get their feedback in as close to real-time as possible.
These are just a few ways you can improve your incentive program results, and all key capabilities our software supports.
Provided by our partners at Kademi