How Maytronics runs a more profitable rebate campaign with Tremendous

The highlight reel

→ Maytronics is a robotic pool cleaner manufacturer that runs multiple annual rebate campaigns specific to purchases made from brick-and-mortar stores.

→ For 2024, customers who purchased a qualifying pool cleaner from a brick-and-mortar store between February and October were eligible to receive a rebate ranging from $50 to $200. The program was available in the US and Canada.

→ Before Tremendous, Maytronics used another popular incentives platform to send rebates, but the process was rife with issues. Many customers didn’t receive their rebate, and by the time they were delivered, the rebates had often already expired.

→ That meant Maytronics frequently paid for each customer’s rebate twice: once for the expired rebate, and then again to reissue new ones to frustrated customers. 

→ After switching to Tremendous, Maytronics can issue customer rebates that don’t expire for up to a year — and sending, tracking, and branding rebates is easier than ever. 

→ “With Tremendous, we have peace of mind.”

The problem

Rebates are an extremely effective marketing promotion for Maytronics, a robotic pool cleaner manufacturer. The company runs multiple annual rebate programs, including their “Dolphin Days” promotion, which ran from February through October in 2024. Rebate amounts ranged from $50 - $200 depending on the model that was purchased. 

“Our rebate programs allow brick-and-mortar stores to compete with internet pricing,” said Clark Sparrow, Brick-and-Mortar Marketing Program Administrator at Maytronics. “The programs support our dealers, and are great incentives to buy local. They also help us move product and free up expensive warehouse space.”

When Clark first joined the Maytronics team, managing the program was a pain.

The vendor Maytronics used to send rebates made tracking, branding, and managing the rebate program a headache — for the Maytronics team and card recipients.

All creative design for campaigns, card layout, and verbiage was controlled by the vendor, who was often unresponsive. Maytronics went through five account managers in one and a half years with that vendor. “The original company just didn’t pivot fast enough to support our efforts, and since we were at their mercy to set up new card products, there were missed opportunities. Setting up a card product or a campaign would literally take months, which just isn’t acceptable.”

Another issue affecting the rebate programs was responding to customers who had not received their rebates. Identifying which rebates landed in recipients’ inboxes was a manual, time-consuming process, because Maytronics’ previous vendor didn’t send admins any alerts if an email had bounced. Worse yet, customer care did not have the tools to resolve a case within a single call and needed to escalate rebate issues. That became a huge bottleneck for the program, since everything went through a single person.

“Email delivery failure was high with our previous vendor,” said Clark. “Customers would call us saying they hadn’t received their rebates months after we had sent them out. I couldn’t search for recipients by email address on our previous platform. To find a rebate status, I’d have to search Salesforce by the customer’s machine serial number, manually review their rebate record, determine the date we’d run the card batch, and verify that the customer’s rebate was uploaded to the vendor on that date. Then I’d need to go to our vendor’s dashboard and search within that specific batch of rebates to view the customer’s rebate status. The entire process probably took 3 to 5 minutes depending on what information the customer was able to provide me. I spent a minimum of a few hours a day resolving rebate escalations.”

Because many customers didn’t think to call about their rebate for months after their initial application, many rebates had expired by the time they called Maytronics for assistance.

“With our old vendor, rebates expired quickly,” said Clark. “Cards expired 6 months from the date of issue, regardless of whether or not the customer had accessed their funds. Even when we were sure that a customer hadn’t received the email or had the ability to access their funds, the vendor’s stance was that they had sent it out so it was not their problem. The vendor kept those unspent funds, and the money was lost. Maytronics would pay out the rebate a second time to honor our commitment to the customer. That made the rebate program an unmitigable financial risk.”

It was because of these problems that Maytronics began searching for a new vendor to issue their rebate cards. “I looked at about five different vendors,” said Clark. “Early on in the search, it was clear Tremendous solved all of our problems.”

A transparent, cost-efficient rebate program

Shortly after switching to Tremendous, the Maytronics team was struck by how simple it was to track rewards. 

“The Tremendous dashboard is streamlined,” said Clark. “You can actually see all the information you need about a rebate or a recipient at a glance.”

Before Tremendous, tracking down a recipient’s rebate meant toggling through two different applications. “Now, I can search for any recipient easily right in the Tremendous dashboard,” said Clark. “I can pull everything up.” 

Maytronics can also add any number of teammates to their account. 

“That was something we didn’t have the capability to do with our last vendor,” said Clark. “Being able to add team members to Tremendous cut out about 75% of the emails I got from customer care. Now, customer care is able to resolve the complaint while on the phone with the customer, rather than escalating to me via email for follow up. That means there aren’t multiple calls about the same issue, miscommunications, or any wait for the customer. We saw a 9% decrease in calls to customer care concerning rebates within the first year of switching to Tremendous, and everyone agrees that the process moves much smoother now.”

Resolving tickets is also easier for the care team

“We spend substantially less time resolving requests,” said Clark. “The dashboard makes searching and resolution easier, so each call is handled in about 1 minute instead of 5.”

Not only is Maytronics saving time managing rebates — the company is also saving money on its program. 

“The funds we send out through Tremendous don’t expire for a long time,” said Clark. “We send the rebate once, and that money stays available to the customer until they log in and register their card. We are able to tell if the email has reached the customer’s email address and if they have accessed their card. If they didn’t receive their email or haven’t logged in, they have up to a year to do so. Once they do, their funds are available to spend for six months. This is much simpler, transparent for everyone involved, and it’s saving us all the money that we would be spending twice under the old vendor.”

Sending rebates, simplified

In addition to spending less time in his inbox answering customer care questions about missing rebates, Maytronics also spends less time sending rewards.

“The dashboard is so clean,” said Clark. “I don’t have to hunt for things. With our previous vendor, I used to get five clicks deep and realize I was in the wrong place. That doesn’t happen anymore.”

He can also create branded rebate campaigns himself in minutes. 

“With our previous vendor, they had all the creative design control,” said Clark. “I wasn’t able to create my own campaigns. Even if I just wanted to change the verbiage in a message, I had to reach out and submit a request for that. I love the fact that I can just quickly do it myself [in Tremendous]. We have different card templates for each program and audience. If I need to alter something or introduce a new campaign, I can do the setup myself in a very short time.” 

The outcome

Since launching its rebate program, Maytronics has seen a significant uptick in sales as a direct result of the campaign. Recent sales surpassed 2020 numbers, when sales skyrocketed during quarantine.

“This year, we’re seeing significantly more participation in the rebate programs over what we saw during COVID,” said Clark.

Volume is up, but stress is down.

“Since switching to Tremendous, we continue to see a decrease in calls to customer care about rebate-related issues,” said Clark. “We’re down approximately 17% overall from when we started using Tremendous, in spite of growing the program each year. We’ve also had proportionately fewer email deliverability issues year over year.”

Despite its growing popularity, Maytronics’ finance team, customer care team, and rebate team spend less time managing the rebate program than ever. 

“The ease of use has been great,” said Clark. “Our operations are so much simpler since our finance team doesn’t have to process each rebate. Each member of our Finance team can log in and get real-time information on our spend, outgoing orders, and account balances.” 

When customers do have questions about their rebates, Maytronics’ customer care team can answer inquiries quickly.

“With Tremendous, we have peace of mind,” said Clark. “We know recipients received their rebate. And their rebate doesn’t expire for up to a year, so it’s very rare that anyone’s rebate will have actually expired when they go looking for it.” 

Ready to launch a simple rebate program? Chat with our team.