The COVID-19 pandemic brought immense challenges to tire and auto industries. Reports indicate that the tire industry is “experiencing its largest volume declines in decades” and a slow recovery is expected. This recovery process is sure to make competition in the tire industry fierce. How can tire manufacturers prepare for this future and come out ahead? I’d like to focus on three sales incentive strategies that can help tire suppliers be proactive, establish competitive advantages, and boost market share.
Sales incentives can improve your brand experience.
The importance of emotional connection in customer loyalty is well-documented. Forrester research, for example, says that customers are loyal to brands they associate with value, appreciation, and happiness. It’s not always, easy as a tire or auto company, to elicit these emotions. End-consumers may have infrequent or negative reasons for doing business with you, and dealers/distributors often have no special emotions about the manufacturers they work with. Incentive rewards allow you to add emotion and personal relevance to your products and services. What’s more emotional and personally relevant than a family vacation funded by loyalty points, for example?
Not only are rewards exciting in and of themselves, but you can add features to a sales incentive or loyalty program that make them more engaging. Gamification functions such as Spin-to-Win or Scratch Off enrollment bonuses, or public leaderboards tracking sales performance, add elements that keep your program participants coming back.
You can personalize marketing and incentive program experience.
Research collected by Forbes says that 71% of consumers are frustrated when their shopping experience is impersonal and 70% of millennials are frustrated when they receive irrelevant marketing emails. An incentive program can help you offer personalized interactions with your brand.
With organization structure and hierarchy segmentation features, you can divide up your incentive program audience. Just a few things this allows you to do:
- Set up multiple, simultaneous sales promotions with different goals and different participating groups.
- Separate salespeople by region, dealership, organization, performance level, and more.
- Restrict dealer/distributors’ incentive program access and permissions to only features and areas relevant to them.
- Access and export different sets of analytics for each sales channel segment.
- Structure different reward payouts according to segment.
- Tailor incentive program website content, emails, and automated texts using dynamic tokens that pull participant contact info.
With a combination of tools and strategies to personalize your incentive program and channel marketing, you create an experience that’s more intuitive and enjoyable to sales channel partners. Building up these positive sentiments creates the kind of brand affinity and loyalty necessary to boost market share.
You can gather customer and sales data to develop improved sales and marketing strategies.
An incentive program can help you collect sales and customer data about your distribution channel, so you can develop data-driven sales and marketing strategies. These informed strategies help you boost market share.
For example, you can use rewards to motivate participants to submit testimonials, reviews, referrals, and feedback surveys. Participants can submit this data using incentive program features such as file upload and sales claims validation, or quiz and questionnaire administration. Set the program up to automatically deposit reward funds or points in exchange for this data. This creates an incentive to provide sales and customer data where previously there was none, and a continuous source of insights that helps you create data-driven sales and marketing strategies.
As the world adjusts to greater digitalization and increased remote working, it’s still uncertain how much post-pandemic changes are permanent. It will help tire manufacturers to get proactive, using strategies such as incentive programs to boost market share without taking bigger risks such as lowering price points. Incentive and loyalty programs can help you gain competitive advantage that also contributes to sales and marketing goals.
