1. What is a Loyalty program?
It is a strategy used by companies to create a bond with their customers and employees and engage with them. The best way to achieve loyalty is through rewards and recognition consistently and every time they reach some achievement. This strategy is based on the Endowment Effect, which states that people value something more when they own it.
This means that when people are given a gift by their company, they will value it and they will feel like giving back, thus building a truer bond with the company itself. Creating a positive experience will psychologically affect your audience and make them loyal to your brand and make them feel like they are truly part of the community. It is very important to have a strong client base to support your business since you want them to keep coming back to your brand.
2. Why Gift Cards?
Studies show that gift cards are the most chosen item when people want to achieve maximum happiness when giving gifts. The reasons why gift cards work so well are due to their extreme flexibility and their ease of delivery. They are easy to get, supply, and allow the users to get what they truly want and need: it is a win-win solution for both the company and the receivers. They have the highest ROI in incentive marketing since the money you invest gets directly to your audience. Moreover, they are used globally and are recognized as a great gift to get. The receiver can choose what is best for them and manage their gift how they please.
3. What Strategy?
Every project must start with research and planning. It is fundamental to fully understand every aspect of the journey you are starting and decide how much you want to invest in incentive marketing. Your goal should be to have the best loyalty program you can, without wasting money. The best way to achieve satisfaction is to provide a gift that will be appreciated: to do so you need to know what your audience needs. With the right data, you can have the best tailor-made incentive program that will provide the best rewards for your audience and the highest Return On Investment for the company. You should consider factors such as age, country, interests, average income, and spending habits: the more you know and the most effective you will be. A technological platform can give you the valuable opportunity to analyze the performance of your investment and know where you can improve your incentive program.
4. What are the Benefits?
A client or an employee that feels valued will improve their performance. Whether the consequences are more purchases from the client or a happier and more productive employee, the company gets benefits.
Nowadays the competition is getting harder and harder, and having a strong brand with a strong community that promotes a healthy and positive work environment is fundamental to avoiding churns or the risk of a high turnover of employees.
In a globalized society, where news is shared instantly all-over social media, having a good work environment results in an improvement of the brand reputation since employees and clients themselves are promoting and advertising for the company. Incentive marketing is so much more than simply giving gifts.
5. What do you need to do?
Strategy and planning are the first steps.
If you want to invest in incentive marketing, you need to have a clear idea of what your goals are and how much you need to invest to achieve them. You need to consider what kind of clients or employees you want to reward, whether it is an achievement reward or a broader one if you want to have a long-term program or prefer to have it for a specific period.
Next, you need some information about the group of people you plan on rewarding, such as age, interests, geographic location, average salary, etc. Having all the data you need will allow you to build a more effective program since you will be able to choose exactly what will make your audience happy.
Being able to customize and personalize your program depending on your audience’s demographics will make a difference in how efficient your investment is.
Finally, you need to choose a platform and begin the loyalty program.
6. How to Choose a Platform?
There are many factors that you must consider before choosing an incentive marketing platform. Let’s look at the most important ones:
- Variety of gift ideas
- Easy integration with your systems
- Return on Investment
- Advanced technology
- Global coverage
- Experience
Always remember that what you want to achieve is to make your audience feel loved and connected to your business.
Your incentive program must be first and foremost an amazing experience for them. You want them to feel good about receiving a gift and remember it.
The shopping moment needs to be smooth and easy for them, with easy-paying methods and user-friendly platforms.
Why ROIWARD
Every investment and project needs time to be spent on data analysis and planning, but thanks to skilled companies such as ROIWARD, the process is way easier than you may think.
This is the great perk of a technologically advanced platform, they do not simply offer you a new way to do the same thing online, but they provide advantages that would never be possible with a traditional incentive program (to see why digital rewards are better than physical one check our article)
You need to choose the best loyalty platform on the market, one that can offer you the most out of your investment and the highest return on investment.
Book a demo with us to discover the incentive marketing world or to drastically improve the system you are already using.
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Sources
- G. Austin, L. Huang; First Choice? Last resort? Social risks and gift card selection; «Journal of Marketing Theory and Practice», Vol. 20, No. 3, 2012; pp. 293-305.
