Pentair

Multi-Year Product Rebate Program

Man jumping into pool

Pentair, the world’s leading marketer of pool equipment, wanted to initiate a seasonal rebate program to boost pool equipment sales. They also wanted to better understand sales patterns and identify opportunities within their network of distributors, retailers and service professionals. Pentair knew this information would initiate deeper, ongoing customer relationships that are critical to their business.

Since 2013, we’ve partnered with Pentair to launch, manage, and continuously improve their annual B2C and B2B rebate programs. In that time, the rebate campaigns evolved from a single test-and-learn seasonal campaign without any marketing automation, to multiple always-on, sophisticated, product-lifecycle-driven programs that are integrated with Pentair’s customer relationship management and experience management platforms.

Graphic showing Blue Flame Thinking and Pentair's phased approach to rebate program

Kicking Off The Rebate Campaign

Our long-standing relationship with Pentair and our understanding of their market situation made us a natural fit to help plan and execute the initiation of the rebate program in 2013. The first steps were to create seasonal campaigns for Pentair’s pumps and automatic cleaners. The campaigns included straightforward point-of-sale, print, and online promotions to create program awareness and capture customer information for ongoing marketing communications.

Pentair rebate campaign digital and print media including beach balls, stickers, print posters, balloons, and digital banners
Blue Flame Thinking's digital rebate campaign examples for Pentair

Measuring Results and Making Improvements

Initial efforts produced encouraging results and pointed to untapped opportunities for connecting with customers. With close collaboration between Blue Flame Thinking and Pentair, the rebate program evolved over the next five years to include a robust mix of digital and print media tactics that increased the digital presence for Pentair’s sales team.

In order to better understand how each campaign tactic was working, we developed a dashboard system that streamlined reporting and program optimization. It allowed for rapid data collection and analysis to make informed adjustments to the media mix, frequency and messaging.

Marketing Tactics Utilized

  • Social media
  • Email marketing
  • Retargeting campaigns
  • Sponsorships
  • Influencer outreach
  • Sweepstakes
  • In-store collateral
  • Push notifications

Building the Right Audience

In order to create a large prospecting base early in the rebate program, we created a pool lifestyle photo contest sweepstakes for Facebook users that very successfully built a large database of pool owners for active prospecting through Pentair’s CRM platform.

Social Media Sweepstakes
Make a Clean SweepStakes example of BFT's rebate campaign for Pentair

Results