How to Run a Successful B2B Loyalty Program, 5 Ways

5 min readOct 31, 2020

Are you interested in learning about the effectiveness of a B2B loyalty program?

Top B2B (Business to Business) businesses today thrive on customer retention and loyalty.

Capturing new leads for your B2B business will be beneficial. But, solely focusing on customer acquisition may not be fruitful for your business in the long run.

Statistics are proof of this fact. Did you know that 65% of a company’s business comes from existing customers? Also, increasing customer retention by 5% can boost your profits from 25% to 95%! Hence, customer loyalty is something that B2B businesses must focus on.

One of the proven techniques to significantly increase your customer loyalty: Creating an effective B2B loyalty program. Loyalty programs can lead to increased customer engagement, improved customer loyalty, and ultimately an increase in revenue.

Let’s find out some sure-shot strategies to create and run a successful B2B loyalty program.

1. Identify the Types of Customers for Your Loyalty Program

Before you do anything else, you must start by identifying the customers you want to target for your B2B loyalty program.

Not all customers would be the right fit for your loyalty programs. And, not all customers would react the same way to your loyalty tactics. Based on the different types of customers, you can create different promotion techniques and offer different rewards.

You can segment your customers into different categories such as loyalists, pseudo-loyalists, bargain hunters, etc. You can specifically target each of these customer segments with different kinds of loyalty programs. This will help you to get more engagement for your loyalty programs right from the start.

2. Offer Irresistible Discounts

Unlike the common notion, discounts are not just for B2C (Business to Consumer) loyalty programs. In fact, numerous B2B businesses have found success by offering transaction-based discounts as rewards for their loyalty programs.

Such discounts can be offered after a customer completes an order. This can be an exclusive discount offered for the next purchase or all future purchases.

These offers can be super helpful for both the business and the customers. Customers are happy to get discounts, and you get increased sales and revenue.

If you are seeing a vast majority of customers abandoning your brand after the first purchase, then a discount-based loyalty program is a must-try. By offering discounts, you can turn tons of new customers into life-long repeat customers.

Moreover, by offering discounts, you’ll more than makeup for the amount you have offered as a discount. Everyone loves discounts. Hence, you’ll see a significant increase in the number of sales as well as the overall revenue generated.

Offering discounts leads to happier customers, ultimately leading to a better brand reputation. More people would want to purchase from your brand and you will get increased visibility on various platforms.

3. Optimize your Loyalty Program Using Data from a CRM Tool

Segmentation and personalization can boost the results of your loyalty programs by multiple folds. This is because all your customers are different. They come from different demographics, locations, ages, gender, and have different interests, etc.

Hence, fine-tuning your B2B loyalty program rewards to best fit specific customer needs can fetch your better results and increased customer loyalty. For example, some customers would be interested in life-time rewards and discounts. While some might be looking for discounts just for their next purchase.

For identification of such customers and segmenting them into different categories, a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) tool such as SuperOffice can come in extremely handy. SuperOffice CRM tool keeps track of all customer touchpoints and every piece of customer data at a common portal.

Using SuperOffice, you can forecast customer behavior well and make informed decisions based on the entire customer history. Using this powerful CRM tool, you can also personalize your loyalty programs to attain increased customer engagement.

Moreover, SupperOffice also helps you to create account-based loyalty programs. You can keep track of all the accounts and their contacts at a commonplace. You can then target these accounts based on the customer data obtained from the CRM tool.

4. Design Captivating Referral Programs

B2B referral programs are something that can bring in the bucks for your company, apart from increased customer retention. When a trusted friend or family member recommends a product to you, you’ll most certainly consider checking it out. This is why referral programs can turn out to be the best form of loyalty programs for your business.

Just like the other types of loyalty programs, the meat of referral programs also lies in the rewards that you are offering. Hence research your existing customers or survey them. Find out what rewards would they be most interested in. You should also experiment with different formats of referral programs and different types of rewards.

5. Re-engage Inactive Loyalty Program Customers

When customers sign up for your loyalty programs, the enthusiasm is quite high. But the excitement dies down after some time. You won’t be able to reap the benefits of your loyalty programs if this happens.

Continually engaging and re-engaging your loyalty program customers can help. Increase customer engagement by offering new rewards, tier incentive loyalty programs, or through gamification. By engaging your loyalty program customers this way, you can bring about a massive reduction in your customer churn rates.

An advanced CRM tool like SuperOffice can, again, come to your rescue here. Using SuperOffice, you can segment and identify customers who are showing lesser involvement and engagement. Based on this data, you can laser-target such customers.

B2B Loyalty Program FAQ

Conclusion: B2B Loyalty Program

Customer loyalty is the lifeblood of any successful B2B business today. Without a strong foundation of a loyal customer base, surviving the competition of the B2B industry can be quite challenging.

So, take inspiration from these strategies and start creating your B2B loyalty program today.

Author: Tim Ferguson

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Originally published at https://www.mostlyblogging.com on October 31, 2020.