Businesses use rewards and incentives for one primary reason: they help deliver business results. With the uncertainty almost every business is dealing with, customer engagement is at a premium and demonstrating results is more important than ever. New research from Blackhawk Network (BHN), a global leader in branded payments and reward solutions, highlights how businesses can intelligently leverage precious marketing dollars using reward and incentive based promotions that outperform discounts.
Across multiple industries and use cases, companies that use promotional rewards and incentives such as gift and prepaid cards or digital incentives report significantly better results across key business metrics. Through a more engaged customer base, these promotions translate to improved business outcomes including better customer experience (CX), higher sales and revenue, greater customer lifetime value (CLV) and more efficient sales pipelines.
“During uncertain economic times, we see businesses increase their focus on three things: retaining the customers they have, effectively competing for precious new customers, and retaining their best employees. This is a very clear formula,” said David Leeds, SVP, Strategy and Sales, BHN. “Our research found that the most forward-thinking businesses are employing reward and incentive based promotions, as opposed to discounting, to boost marketing ROI. In doing so, these companies are also bolstering customer satisfaction and saving money. Happy customers have become a business imperative, and strategic marketing campaigns that offer rewards and incentives smartly position companies to nurture valuable customer relationships.”
According to BHN’s research, top performance advantages for reward- and incentive-based promotions (compared to those that offer discounts) include:
- ~2x the annual improvement in customer satisfaction (60%)
- ~1.5x improvement in cross- and up-sell revenue YOY
- 34% higher growth in customer lifetime value
- 36% greater improvement in shortening the length of sales cycles
- 16% higher return on marketing investment
- 15% higher increase in profit per customer
- 14% better marketing conversion rate
Promotional rewards and incentives can be used for:
- Sign-ups, gifts with purchase and rebates
- Completing demos or submitting quote requests
- Reviews, referrals and testimonials
- Loyalty programs
- Sweepstakes and contests
- Survey participation
- Appeasements
For more such updates, follow us on Google News Martech News