| Experts Corner |  CRM investment is wasted if the intelligence it delivers fails to influence despatched communications. How can businesses ensure that money spent on CRM analytics actually begins to benefit the messages that are delivered to customers and prospects?
David Jefferies, Marketing Director, Pitney Bowes
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Building B-to-B e-Loyalty
By Ellen Reid Smith, President, Reid Smith & Associates
CRM has been around for years now, and I’m still seeing B-to-B loyalty programs described as merely tools for sales reps and lead tracking. I think the CRM industry has defined loyalty programs for businesses as sales tools because that’s what the big guys want to sell. Well, I want to go on record as saying that B-to-B loyalty takes a lot more than sales tracking.
Small businesses frequently act like consumers—especially when they have a sole proprietor. So treating small businesses like consumers, isn’t a bad idea. In fact, it’s why so many consumer programs, like credit card reward programs, are used by small businesses. It’s also why rental car companies have more success with small business loyalty, when they give small businesses a consumer program they are already familiar with, but modify it with some strategic benefits tailored to small business owners.
Since small business is frequently one of the hardest segments for large companies to profitably target, using an e-loyalty program makes a lot of sense. With an online program, you can better target different types of small businesses with information and rewards tailored to their needs and expectations. In a sense, you can treat them more like individuals, which is what small business owners relate to best. They want to know you care as much about their business as they do.
Even with the dramatic increase in easy to use web personalization tools, many companies are still not convinced e-loyalty programs are a good idea. They fall back to their “old-school” thinking which dictates that resources are best spent on brand advertising, sales reps and conferences. That’s just not true anymore! Here are nine reasons why implementing a B2B e-loyalty program can be more effective than traditional B2B marketing:
1. The Web is always OPEN!
The Web offers a virtual sales and training room that's open 24 hours a day. Without physical limitations, the Web makes your product training much more accessible than your sales reps or your company conferences. Running a small business is a 24/7 proposition, so allowing business owners to train on their own time, in the privacy/comfort of their home could be a bigger benefit that a free lunch.
2. An e-loyalty program offers training in multiple formats
Small business owners differ dramatically in their product or industry knowledge and their preferred learning styles. But an e-loyalty program can take the guesswork out of picking a style that best persuades or trains each of your customers by letting customers navigate to their preferred format. Even the positioning of a product can be tailored by industry or product use for a more targeted sales message. Your best sales staff would have trouble picking the right approach with your customers 100% of the time, but a good e-loyalty program may not.
3. The Web allows better feedback
How many times have you had to nag your sales force to send feedback promptly? Typically if it doesn't help their commission, a sales person will not put customer feedback on the top of their to-do list. But an e-loyalty program provides real-time feedback via Web logs, tracking software and customer feedback prompts. This feedback can help you identify problems faster and help you to better compare feedback across industries.
4. An e-loyalty program can be more interactive than a sales rep
Because the Web is interactive, it can more closely mimic a human relationship through intelligent, two-way dialogs. Customers can research specific topics rather than waiting for the product rep to return their call and or use creative product demos for a more "real life" experience. Your website can act like a human, or even be a human through email or instant messaging. The fact is, sales reps aren't as interactive as you might think. They normally get very little time with the customer and therefore must rely on customers to read the "leave behinds." And while sales reps can't be knowledgeable on all aspects of a product, your website can.
5. Brand advertising doesn't build relationships
Branding is about awareness, but loyalty goes much deeper, providing an emotional bond to your product that will stand the test of time, price and competition. Branding can be accomplished with advertising, but loyalty is a two-way street and requires a relationship of interaction, trust and mutual respect. Without a loyalty program, you just can't build the kind of bond needed to defend a brand against strong competition.
6. More bang for your buck
Your company probably has multiple promotions running out of multiple product divisions, customer support centers and sales teams at any given time. A loyalty program centralizes all customer communications into "one voice" that remembers and recognizes their needs. This means that only promotions that directly meet a customer's needs are sent and where multiple promotions, benefits or rewards are appropriate, they are combined into one concise message that is more effectively communicated.
7. Identifies high-value customers
An e-loyalty program helps you identify each customer's value. It does this by giving customers a reason to be profiled and tracked. So not only will you be able to treat best customers better, you'll also be able to identify customers with the potential to be high-value and provide them with incentives that increase their spending. So not only will you reward customer based on value, your “thank-you's” will be more effective.
8. The Web saves money
Web relationships can be started and maintained at a fraction of the cost of offline relationships. This doesn't mean companies will never use sales reps, the phone or postal system again, but it means they can use the Web to start relationships with all customers and reserve more expensive offline tactics for high-value customers where the payback is more sure.
9. If you don't do it, your competition will
The Web makes building and maintaining relationships affordable, even for your smallest competitor. So you can bet that your competitors are already planning an e-loyalty strategy. In fact, your smaller competitor might even be better at building relationships online because they are closer to the customers they serve. So NOT building an e-loyalty program won't be an option much longer for profitable companies.
Ellen Reid Smith, President, Reid Smith & Associates
Ellen Reid Smith is the author of e-Loyalty: How To Keep Customers Coming Back to Your Website, and is CEO of Reid Smith & Associates www.reidsmith.com , a consulting firm specializing in loyalty marketing strategies. She regularly speaks to marketing conferences on many different topics relating to customer loyalty. Learn about her speaking topics and get free CRM tips from her self-help site, The e-Loyalty Resource at www.e-loyalty.com.
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