Though you can count Incentive Marketing as a form of a marketing campaign in its own right (and worth investing extra time in), expanding your marketing strategy to include at least a few incentives can be a powerful aid in retention, conversion, and engagement.
The backbone of incentive marketing is incredibly straightforward: appealing to our desire to earn rewards and get prizes. Simply put, it feels good to win or be rewarded for our loyalty.
When used appropriately in consideration of your audience and the type of business you are promoting, incentives can have a major impact on the effectiveness of your marketing strategies as a whole.
There are a lot of areas where incentive marketing can give you an extra edge against the competition. These include brand awareness, lead generation, purchasing pushes, retention, feedback, and referrals. Read on to learn how you can apply incentives to reach your business goals.
Increasing Brand Awareness
Brand awareness is exactly what it sounds like. It isn’t about pushing a specific product or service so much as it is getting your business – and your brand – seen. These incentives aren’t an exchange. There is no immediate return, so you do want to be sure that these perks are given freely – and strategically. These rewards include free samples and/or products, sweepstakes & contests, and branded swag giveaways.
Gaining Leads
Lead generation rewards are always an exchange. You get an award, but not for nothing. For this type of incentive, you are going to provide some personal information in exchange. One thing to keep in mind with this form of incentive is to keep your exchange as easy to complete as possible for the consumer – too many steps, or too much is required, and you will lose your potential lead.
You also want to keep in mind that exchanges like these work best when you have something of value to share with your audience. Something they would be willing to make the exchange for. Understanding your audience is key. Offering a free trial for a newly released product, access to ebooks, or coupons and discounts in exchange for some personal information are all on-point types of lead-generating incentives.
Motivating Purchases
Moving on the fence leads to committing to a purchase with a sweetened deal is a perfect example of incentives motivating a purchase. The incentive increases your odds, so they’re more likely to buy. There are quite a few ways that incentives can drive sales, including reducing the cost of a purchase or adding value to a purchase through an additional bonus.
Think about the buy one, get one free offer, or free item with purchase campaigns. These are great tools for improving the odds of a sale. Coupons, free upgrades, discounts, and sweepstakes with each purchase garnering an entry are all fantastic ways to drive sales.
Improving Retention
Retention incentives can often be a bit of that lead generation exchange – since you may be collecting information in exchange for the joining of something fun, or participation in something worthwhile, but this reaches further. Discounts and store credits, feature upgrades, early access passes, and sweepstakes are all great ways to keep your customer base coming back for more.
Last, but not least, let’s talk about loyalty programs. Did you know that 69% of consumers say that getting loyalty points impacts their choice of retailer? That’s some serious sway! The best incentives for retention are typically part of an ongoing loyalty program. And the best way to get customers to join your program is by offering it up for free.
A survey conducted by Vibe indicated that 61% of consumers subscribe to (and enable) mobile push notifications only for loyalty program incentive news. For a deeper read on loyalty programs, check out this quick read.
Motivating Referrals
Referrals are fantastic. Why? Because people trust their peers far more than they trust seemingly random messages that come directly from your business – or geotargeted ads. In fact, 68% of people trust posted online consumer opinions, while 84% of people trust recommendations from people they know. That’s a lot of influence, so giving your consumers a reason to recommend your business goes a lot further than many other methods of consumer growth.
Offer your loyal customers discounts or store credits in exchange for new referrals. Free products, branded swag, and even cash payments as rewards for increasing your consumer base.
Stimulating Feedback
Feedback is incredibly important in any business model. Without it, you cannot accurately gauge what is going well, and what could be better. But if you’ve ever tried to get people to sit down and provide feedback, you know that most people will opt to ignore the ask. Filling out a survey is not usually an exciting thing – and so incentivizing the completion can significantly increase your return rate.
Best Practices in Incentive Marketing
No matter what you are creating incentives for, there are some basic guidelines that you want to keep top-of-mind for the best chances of success:
- Keep it simple: The most effective incentives are simple and straightforward. Customers should know exactly how to earn them – and that the rewards feel achievable. This promotes trust in your brand and helps prevent incentive breakage.
- Reminders for expiring incentives: Studies show that 43% of incentives expire before they’re redeemed. By gently reminding customers of the impending expiration you give them a chance to use the reward – and remind them of your brand.
- It doesn’t have to be monetary: Non-monetary rewards are just as effective – if not more so – than their monetary counterparts. Further, diversifying the types of rewards helps to appeal to a larger audience with varying interests and needs.
- Make a game of it: Incorporating challenges, point-keeping, leaderboards, and achievements can be very effective in making your brand fun and engaging for your audience. These elements are already well known from various games like football, basketball, etc. This is a great way to get your consumer base motivated.
- Make sure your incentives tie into your brand: Incentives should keep your brand at the forefront for consumers. An easy way of ensuring that your incentives are bringing along brand awareness in the process is through branded incentives and in-store credits, coupons, upgrades, and anything else with direct connections to your service or product.
- Know your audience: Understanding what rewards will appeal to your audience requires a little work on the front end for you. It’s not always the most expensive choices – or what you would personally choose – that would be most appealing to your given audience. Do the research, and you can tailor your rewards to fit your consumer base far better.
The bottom line is this: keep it fun, simple, and generous, and your consumers will enjoy participating – and your business will benefit from effective incentive marketing campaigns.
Looking for some help in getting the ball rolling? KSR is here to help! Reach out today.
