Sweepstakes remain popular with both consumers and brands. Consumers get the chance to win something, while brands get to collect valuable customer data or generate more leads and loyalty. What’s not to like, right? Unlike other ways to distribute incentive rewards, sweepstakes do have some drawbacks. For starters, they deliver incentives to only a few of the people — selected at random — who complete the desired task. (Everyone who submits a survey, for example, is entered to win a relatively large prize, such as $300 or an iPad, and only one or two names are chosen.) In addition, doing sweepstakes as incentive rewards does not garner the same results as instant rewards. To compare the two incentive types, market research community e-Rewards sent the same survey to 8,000 people, but half were incentivized with entry into a drawing for $2,500, and the other half were offered $2 in cash. The study results, which were cited in the book People, Preferences and Prices, showed that within a week, the individual rewards sample had a response rate of 19.3%, compared with 12.2% for the sweepstakes group. READ MORE: The Average Survey Response Rate and How to Beat It Given the lower...
There are lots of ways that rewards can help your sales team improve their numbers and solve everyday problems. But how each rep uses incentives to boost sales depends greatly on their role and what part of the sales cycle they work on. In fact, using incentives to boost sales really starts with your marketing team, who can use rewards to increase their webinar attendance, bring in more leads, and support customer engagement activities. But once a lead is in the hands of your salespeople, rewards can be even more effective in moving prospects further along the buyer’s journey. Here are how reps in each sales role can use incentives to hit their quotas and benefit the company’s bottom line. READ MORE: 3 Ways Online Gift Cards Can Help Close More Deals Sales Development Reps (SDRs) SDRs typically interact with people in the beginning of the sales cycle and are often in charge of prospecting, qualifying leads, and scheduling initial meetings. Prospecting is never easy, considering that less than 24% of sales emails are opened by recipients, and it takes an average of 18 calls to connect with a buyer on the phone, according to Gartner. For these reps, using...
Professionals everywhere are feeling the pinch this year. Economic concerns have caused companies to tighten budgets across the board, including marketing and research programs. And that means your reward incentives dollars are even more precious. The money you put toward rewards are vital to your success, especially in a tough economy. Those incentives are what make your survey response rates higher, your marketing campaigns more effective, and your customers more loyal. You do, however, need to stretch that limited rewards budget as far as possible and make sure nothing is wasted. There are certainly ways to make your reward incentives more affordable, but there are also things you can do to protect the rewards you do purchase. A digital incentives management platform like BHN Rewards can help with built-in controls and features. Here are four ways to keep those rewards safe. READ MORE: 5 Ways to Recession-Proof Your Incentives for Engaged Customers Set Up Separate Budget Groups Make sure that each team or project spends only the budget allotted for that specific use. With separate budget groups, you won’t need to worry about funds getting crossed. You can also add multiple funding sources and choose which source should be used...
It’s Marketing 101. Mapping the customer journey gives your team valuable insights into common pain points — pain points you can lessen with rewards and incentives. No matter where your customers or clients are on their buying journey, there’s a lot you can do to move the needle. Looking to drive webinar attendance, motivate customers to add to their cart, or generate leads from referrals? Including the right rewards at key touchpoints will help you optimize the customer experience. Here are 15 ideas for incorporating rewards and incentives throughout the five main stages of the customer journey: awareness, consideration, purchase, retention, and advocacy. READ MORE: 5 Steps to a Successful Marketing Rewards Campaign Stage 1: Awareness The beauty of customer journey mapping is that it allows your marketing team to personalize the experience across all touchpoints. According to Salesforce, 56% of consumers expect all offers to be personalized. A key step to generating awareness? Picking rewards and incentives that speak to your target audience. Increase webinar attendance. Offer a digital gift card to attendees after the webinar for an effective way to encourage people to register and follow through. Build relationships for account-based marketing (ABM). Create upfront value for key...
Driving a steady pipeline of marketing qualified leads (MQLs) is critical for every marketing team. But quickly converting those MQLs into sales-ready demos? That’s the true sign of success. Weave, an all-in-one customer communication and engagement platform, brings automation and simplicity to its customers. To serve even more companies with its streamlined platform, Weave first needed to fill its funnel with new leads. That’s where the Weave marketing team comes in — specifically their marketing operations specialists. Since they work for a company that focuses on automating tasks and bringing systems together, the marketing operations team truly understands the importance of using tools that fit within their existing ecosystem. Finding the Right Tool for Incentives Fulfillment Weave has been offering prospects a reward for attending a sales demo for years. When the program started, the team used Sendoso as their gift provider. But they “saw BHN Rewards as a more streamlined match for what we were trying to accomplish,” says Senior Marketing Operations Manager Kyle Garrett, relaying what he’d been told about the switch, which happened before he started at Weave. With a short training on the BHN Rewards platform, Garrett and his marketing ops colleague Thomas Nilsen were able...
While the importance of recognizing team members has been well documented in the past few years, the employee rewards ideas that used to be successful just aren’t effective anymore. Before the days of widespread remote work, the Great Resignation, and “quiet quitting,” employees were often happy with whatever they got. And what they got was often — well, it was bad. Blackhawk Network asked to hear about the worst rewards people had received from their employer as a holiday gift, and the answers weren’t encouraging. Among them: An award with my boss’s name. An award with the name of the company misspelled. A desk organizer that was too large for my desk area. A set of Disney DVDs. A fruitcake and a bottle of water in a basket. Whether it’s for the holidays, a big achievement, or a work anniversary, team rewards are successful only if they’re something that the recipients actually want. Here are some common employee rewards ideas that have run their course, along with replacement suggestions. READ MORE: Empower Every Department to Reward Employees With Gift Card Incentives A Pizza Party Pizza parties may be a great prize for high schoolers who did well on a test...
Keeping prospects and customers “warm” is the key to new and repeat business. You probably already send customer appreciation gifts during the end-of-year holiday season. But distributing business gifts for clients at other times of the year gives your brand a chance to stand out from the crowd. There’s so much happening in December that it’s easy to get lost amid all the fruit baskets. Not to mention the unexpected timing will be more conducive to conversations — conversations about your product’s or service’s benefits, the best time to set up a demo, how your onboarding process works, you name it. Catching someone during their slow season, for example, will make them more likely to agree to a discovery call, case study interview, or product upgrade. Make the Timing Personal and Thoughtful Why not switch it up this year, and send business gifts for clients outside December? Changing the timing, along with personalizing each gift, is an opportunity to show you understand your customers’ business or industry. For instance, if your client is a veterinarian’s office, send a gift for National Pet Day on April 11 or National Dog Day on Aug. 26. Work with an accounting firm? Help them...
Diversity is way more than just a buzzword these days. The influence that it’s having on consumer and employee decisions is growing, and businesses must take notice. No marketer, researcher, or employer can afford to neglect diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives, especially with the quick spread of information online and on social media. Industry predictions everywhere are noting the focus on DEI in 2023: Marketers “need to be careful that their messages, images, voices, and values represent the full spectrum of potential customers and not leave anyone out due to their own unconscious bias,” says digital marketing agency Single Grain. For market researchers, the goal should be to “increase sample diversity, with a greater range of demographics represented and therefore a greater chance for businesses to research the entirety of their target audience,” according to Quantilope, a research platform and BHN Rewards partner. Only 58% of individual contributors say their senior leaders show they are genuinely committed to greater DEI, Qualtrics finds. Start With the Right Insights Everyone knows that for insights to be reliable, they have to be representative of your entire customer base, target audience, or staff. That representative data is key to working to be a...
There are countless reasons why you might want to protect the identities of your survey respondents. Maybe you’re conducting a blind clinical study or asking for sensitive personal information. Maybe you need an anonymous survey to meet the requirements of an Institutional Review Board for academic research. Or maybe you’re doing a simple customer or employee feedback survey, but you want to make sure that respondents feel comfortable answering honestly, so you can collect the most accurate insights possible. No matter the reason for keeping responses anonymous, you still need to make sure to attract enough participants. While anonymity and incentives might seem like they don’t go together, using digital rewards allows you to incorporate both — once you understand the two D’s, decoupling and data masking. READ MORE: Survey Design Best Practices From Our Partners Decoupling When you use decoupling to incentivize an anonymous survey, it means you separate the personal information needed for reward delivery (namely the participant’s email address) from the survey response itself. This is usually done with a redirect at the end of the survey. The respondent is redirected to a page from the rewards provider to enter their email address. To make sure you’re...
Did you know that the first Friday in March is Employee Appreciation Day? Workman Publishing launched the holiday back in 1995, and it’s finally gaining steam as companies look for opportunities to improve retention. Research shows that acknowledgement drives employee engagement, encourages high performance, and retains top talent. It’s clear that telling your employees you value their contributions is more important than ever. Employee Appreciation Day is the perfect time to expand your efforts, either by incorporating the event into your employee recognition program — or making a company-wide announcement that you’re officially starting one. To make celebrating your employees effortless on this day — and every day — we’ve rounded up seven special reward ideas. 1. Wellness Perks With burnout on the rise, consider adding or expanding programs that support employees’ physical and emotional wellness, such as: Paid gym memberships Pet-related PTO or pet insurance Employee Assistance Programs Free massages (onsite or via gift cards) Vacation Bucks in the form of Visa or Mastercard virtual prepaid cards or airline or hotel gift cards READ MORE: Improve Retention With These Ideas for Rewarding Remote Employees 2. Social Media Shoutouts Employee Appreciation Day is ideal for recognizing your employees on your...
