How Right Loyalty Programs can Help Manufacturers Build Stronger Bonds
- Posted on September 12, 2022 by Robert
- Reading time about 5 minutes
Building a strong connection with your customers is not essential to boost your business growth but also to retain them for a longer time. Talking about the manufacturing sector, all the goods are sold through different channels such as suppliers, retailers, distributors, and eCommerce websites. This leads to poor connection between brands & customers, resulting in a failure to understand customers better & offering personalized experiences.
However, with the help of the right Manufacture Loyalty Programs, brands can collect first-party data and build customer-centric marketing campaigns using this valuable data to build longer-lasting customer relationships. In this blog, we will see some of the main challenges and how a loyalty program can overcome them with ease.
Challenges Faced by Manufacturing Industry That Hamper the Business Growth
In manufacturing firms, 86% of customers prefer brands that offer personalized communication as it helped in making an informed decision. However, there are some common challenges faced by many manufacturing brands, which are stated below-
– No Proper Communication with Customers
Customer feedback is crucial to understand if the product you are providing is meeting the desired quality and performance standards. The main mistake that many brands face is missing the feedback part from customers, resulting in an inability to know specific customer needs, which leads to poor customer experiences and unsatisfied customers.
– Insufficient Customer Data Collection
For many manufacturing businesses, getting critical information from customers is still a challenge. The only way to collect data for manufacturers is through POS systems, which is not sufficient to know customer purchase patterns & buying behavior. This approach is not very effective in creating the best promotional strategies or forecast demand.
Top Benefits Provided by a Successful Manufacturing Loyalty Program
More than 90% of top manufacturing brands believed that using the right reward and recognition programs can boost business growth and help them gain a competitive advantage. Taking time to build a loyalty program with the right set of features like receipt scanning can help manufacturers gain intelligent customer insights.
Here are some of the ways that show how customer loyalty software can bring benefits to your manufacturing business-
– Know Customers Better
Collecting customer data & extracting insights is not a big deal for retailers but manufacturers, it is still a challenge and that is exactly why a loyalty program is needed. Brand owners can build and maintain a database from data shared by customers through which they can reward them.
The types of data collected in the database that will give access to consumer analytics in real-time are
i) Total active members (number of engaged customers)
ii) Customer behavior (understand behavior depending on action brands take)
iii) Customer demographics (location where purchase was made, age of customers)
iv) Trends (purchase patterns, preferences, etc.)
– Improved Customer Engagement
Many manufacturing brands are offering exciting rewards to customers that are making them stay engaged. However, it is important to make your program interesting, and to do that, we can use gamification as it acts as a great way to engage customers.
Using loyalty program also help brands to communicate regularly with customers, which in turn helps to forecast demands, enhance promotional strategies, & boost customer satisfaction. This also makes it easy for brands to devise hyper-personalized strategies exclusively built to match customer expectations.
– Better Relationship with Partners
As the manufacturing industry deals with several channel partners like retailers, distributors, and wholesalers, it is crucial to build loyalty program strategies targeted at these partners to ensure a better relationship between them. More than 80% of business buyers believe that the experience provided by manufacturers plays an important role in their products.
Using a robust supply chain network is helpful to ensure that the products are highly accessible to customers. Apart from that, making use of loyalty programs that are focused on these channel partners is essential to improve relationships, boost engagement and provide more value to partners as well.
– Boost Customer Engagement
Incentivize customers to make them interested in your products with the help of a loyalty program. Additionally, offering valuable benefits can help brands build emotional attachments with customers. More than 50% of customers are likely to spend extra on their purchases in exchange for a better & personalized customer experience.
Spending on a good loyalty program is often beneficial for manufacturing brands in long run as customers who feel rewarded are more likely to make purchases, thereby increasing the revenue for manufacturers.
– Better Customer Retention Rate
Building a loyalty program is very helpful in increasing the retention of your loyal customers, which thereby helps to boost ROI for your business. Loyal customers are the ones who make frequent purchases and the cost of selling a product to a loyal customer is comparatively lesser than the new ones.
Another plus point of having loyal customers is that they can bring referral business through word-of-mouth marketing. Apart from customer retention, a good loyalty program can help you understand customers’ needs, offer better and relevant services with attractive rewards as well as timely resolution of customer grievances.
Final Takeaways
As we can see that using a well-strategized loyalty strategy can offer great benefits to your manufacturers, it’s time to act now and add a loyalty program to help you understand your customers more effectively and offer relevant incentives based on the insights collected from customer data. Personalized experiences are becoming more important than ever for every business irrespective of the industry they are dealing with. Loyalty programs can enable manufacturing brands to create custom experiences to help bond better with customers as well as channel partners.
Being a robust Loyalty Program Platform backed up with an advanced BI reporting and analytics approach, Novus ensure businesses across the globe deploy the right loyalty strategies to target the right audience at the right time. Feel free to connect with the experts to see how Novus can help your manufacturing business grow with personalized loyalty solutions.