There are multiple ways to stoke partner loyalty, from prioritizing partner experiences to establishing a partner community to backing engagement through tailored incentives and compelling rewards. But when taking a multidimensional approach, only one of four loyalty strategies focuses solely on optimizing barriers to exit the partnership: Inertia Loyalty.
How to Make the Most of Inertia Loyalty
Locking in your partners’ participation means taking advantage of key opportunities to minimize their interest and participation in other programs. Essentially, you want to present opportunities and interactions so actionable and alluring that you rise over competitors time and time again until there’s no need to turn elsewhere.
But we know it can be challenging to capture mindshare and ensure your partners aren’t pulled in other directions. That’s why we can act as your support system to deliver rich insights into your partners’ experiences and guide you through best practices to solidify inertia loyalty among your program’s participants.
Let’s discuss other ways Maritz can support your efforts to maximize inertia loyalty in your program.
Expert Guidance & Support
With our foundation in behavioral science and channel strategy, we know what turns partners away from channel programs and, more importantly, we understand what keeps them committed and involved.
While our powerful suite of products and services focuses more on engaging, motivating, and rewarding than it does on optimizing barriers to exit, we’re committed to helping you unlock the value of inertia loyalty through our strategic guidance and recommendations.
That’s why we can provide:
- Trusted resources to strengthen your brand’s end-user marketing.
- Best practices for growing and nurturing generational loyalty within your program.
- Ongoing support and strategic consultations from a full-service team of channel experts.
Engagement Metrics & Analytics
Our ability to conduct dedicated research to organize and segment partners based on their current engagement allows for more adaptability for your program to support other loyalty initiatives, like tiered programs or customized incentives and rewards.
To help support and adapt your channel strategies, we offer:
- Exclusive Data and Metrics related to partner performance, program activity, and group trends to measure and track essential behaviors.
- Expert Insights and Data Analysis to provide actionable takeaways that inform and enhance strategies responsible for reducing partner attrition and optimizing inertia loyalty tactics.
Inertia Loyalty via Other Dimensions of Loyalty
Inertia is one of the four multidimensional loyalty tactics that can often be strengthened by other techniques. To achieve inertia loyalty’s goal of keeping partners committed to your program and maximizing their obstacles to leaving the partnership, look to other loyalty techniques to reinforce the overall value of your connections.
We can also deploy other solutions geared toward the other loyalty types, which ultimately support inertia efforts, too. This includes:
- True Loyalty Initiatives: Focusing on interactions over transactions using personalization, triggered communications, rule structures that go beyond transactions, meaningful rewards, market development funds, learning and enablement opportunities, feedback and surveys, recognition, soft tier benefits, strong field relationships with field reps., gamification, engaging partner portals, and more.
- Cult Loyalty Initiatives: Prioritizing value alignment using communities and forums, business learning and enablement opportunities, branding, referrals and advocacy programs, certifications, swag and wearables, group incentive trips, rituals, generational loyalty, and more.
- Mercenary Loyalty Initiatives: Driving transactional partner behaviors through value propositions, transaction-based incentives, rebates and cash incentives, points programs, tiered benefits, promotions and SPIFs, discounts, and more.
Acting on Inertia Loyalty
Keeping partners committed to your program can be easier said than done. But with a multi-dimensional approach to building loyalty, you can make the most of opportunities to engage partners on every level.
As you prioritize inertia loyalty and optimize exit barriers for your partners, be thinking about the support you need to support your partners. We’re here to be your loyalty enablers, providing resources, expert consultations, and user experiences that make it easier for you to turn engagement efforts into retention results.
Read about the other dimensions of Channel Loyalty:
- True Loyalty
- Cult Loyalty
- Mercenary Loyalty
Want to learn more about how you can leverage partner loyalty in your program? Contact us to explore our solutions that can empower your partners and elevate your brand.
