An online loyalty programme can help wholesalers finally learn about the people who use their products

For manufacturers and wholesalers, it can be incredibly hard to learn about the consumers that eventually buy and use your products. However, there are new ways that wholesalers are attempting to bridge that information gap; one of those ways is the use of an online loyalty programme.

The very nature of being a retail wholesaler or a manufacturer without a direct sales network means that you never have any contact with the people who actually purchase and use your product.

Traditionally, that didn’t really matter much, either. The focus on many companies was creating and promoting their brand and their image. If you were successful in creating a brand that people wanted to buy, you would get more wholesale orders.

And that was how success was judged and feedback was obtained; through orders. If you had a successful product as a wholesaler, you would get larger and more orders for the product from your resellers. As a manufacturer, your wholesaler distributors would give you feedback about which products they were selling a lot of, and which ones weren’t such a hit with consumers. There was feedback, but never actually from the end user.

But nowadays the traditional business models have been turned on their head, mostly through the advancement of technology. Customers now expect to be able to interact with companies through social media. Consumer product reviews on sites such as Amazon and Yelp directly influence whether or not people use your service or buy your product. Therefore, knowing as much about your end user has become much more of a priority for wholesalers and manufacturers.

That being said, needing to learn more about your customers hasn’t actually made information gathering any easier. Retailers routinely collect information on their customers, but seldom pass that information on up the supply chain.

One solution to this could be the use of an online loyalty programme for wholesalers and manufacturers. An online loyalty programme allows a company to engage directly with their customers over the internet and learn as much as they can from the actual people using their products.

The way an online loyalty programme works is by asking end users to report a purchase or register a product online with the wholesaler once they have bought it from a retail location. Customers are then sometimes asked to give as much information about the purchase as they can (or wish to) including where they bought it, when, why, etc. In exchange for this, they customer collects points which can be redeemed for coupons, free samples, and other gifts in the future.

An online loyalty programme is not perfect, as it only tends to collect information from satisfied customers who already knew and like the brand while unhappy customers don’t usually want to waste their time getting a free sample of something they don’t want. Given that, it is still a way for wholesalers to get at least some useful information and start to fill in the blanks of how customers use their product.

With further advances in technology and more direct customer-company interaction, we can only expect more ways in which wholesalers can gather information and eventually do better business.

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