Many surveys have shown that consumers of all types prefer to get gift cards as rewards because of their flexibility. A prepaid card such as a virtual Visa offers the ultimate choice, since it can be spent at any retailer that accepts that credit card. But research has also shown that consumers want personalized experiences, and a virtual Visa prepaid card doesn’t necessarily scream “personal.” Maybe that doesn’t matter when you’re sending rewards to thousands of survey respondents, but for loyal customers and employees, that special touch is important. Luckily, with just a little creativity and time, you can create a rewards program that offers both the flexibility of a virtual Visa prepaid card and the thoughtfulness of a personal gift. READ MORE: Why You Should Go Digital With Prepaid Incentive Cards Include a Custom Message The easiest and most obvious way to personalize any reward is to make sure it’s accompanied by a custom message. Whenever possible, identify the recipient by name in the delivery email, and be specific about why they are getting the virtual prepaid card. It’s also nice to have the email arrive from and be signed by the employee’s own supervisor or the customer’s dedicated...
Trusting your gut can only get your business so far — knowing what your customers really want and need is what will ensure you succeed. A product feedback survey can provide these valuable customer insights. In addition, when performed on a regular basis, such surveys can help you build a roadmap for making customer-requested enhancements. A side benefit of making a product feedback survey an integral part of your marketing plan? When done right, it can engender customer loyalty. That’s because the survey gives you an opportunity to thank your customers for their business — and their ideas. Getting ideas and even complaints straight from your customers eliminates guesswork for your product management and user experience (UX) teams, so it’s important to get a representative sample. If you haven’t had luck getting enough survey responses, try incentivizing with a digital reward. Response rates will go up, and you’ll improve the quality and quantity of your feedback. To help you make the most out of a product feedback survey program, though, that feedback needs to be collected at several steps along the customer journey. Here are three times you should send surveys and what you need to ask when you do....
U.S. inflation hit a 40-year high in June. The prices for food, gas, and rent are skyrocketing. According to Moody’s Analytics Chief Economist Mark Zandi: “The typical American household now needs to spend $493 more per month to buy the same goods and services they did at this time last year.” What does this mean for your digital rewards program? For starters, now is an excellent time to take stock of the kinds of rewards you’re offering. Recipients are looking for ways to find wiggle room in their budgets — and your rewards may be more attractive to them. To ensure your digitals rewards program is still incentivizing prospects, customers, employees, research participants, or others to take action, here’s what you need to do. Offer Rewards for the Essentials For obvious reasons, it’s a good idea to make sure your digital rewards program have plenty of choices for the items people need and use every day: groceries, gas, and household staples. Gift cards for big-box retailers such as Walmart are especially attractive because recipients can use them to get just about anything they might need. READ MORE: 9 Reasons a Digital E-Gift Card Is Better Than a Physical Card Reevaluate...
Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you probably know that company budgets are tight these days across many industries and fields. Teams are looking to cut costs, increase ROI, and share resources wherever possible, and your gift card platform offers a prime opportunity to do just that. When you can share the tool with other departments, you can also share the cost. But first you have to show them how using rewards — and, more specifically, a gift card platform — can help them reach their own goals. Here are some suggestions to help you convince teams across the company that they need a rewards tool in their tech stack, too. DOWNLOAD THE E-BOOK: Using Rewards in Every Department Marketing With so much growth in martech, there are endless tools to help you streamline your processes and boost engagement. A rewards management platform can do both, making your campaigns and customer engagement efforts more effective without a large time investment. Integrations allow you to automate reward delivery via Marketo, HubSpot, Zapier, Talkable, Yotpo, and other tools in your tech stack. Offer gift cards for attending a webinar, subscribing to a newsletter, following your brand on social media, posting in...
Customers want to feel they come first. Your customer experience metrics can reveal what your brand needs to change to make sure they do. Those insights can cover a lot of ground, though. Customer experience (CX) encompasses more than just customer service. According to McKinsey, CX is “everything an organization does to deliver superior experiences, value, and growth for customers.” And it can’t be ignored if you want your business to succeed: Salesforce reports that 88% of customers say the experience a company provides is as important as its products or services. Outside your customer loyalty program, rewards can be used to maximize every interaction opportunity — and help advance your customer experience metrics along the way. Here are five simple ways to use rewards to optimize your business’s CX. 1. Improve Customer Satisfaction Scores Customer satisfaction (CSAT) scores tell you how happy customers are with your overall service, making them useful for retention efforts. When customers report having a bad service experience, offering to make it right — along with giving them a reward of their choice — shows that you value their business. After you deliver the digital reward, ask them to give a follow-up rating to improve...
While higher education institutions are an industry all their own, they still face many of the same challenges that every business or organization does. And, like those other businesses, colleges and universities can tap into the power of rewards and incentives for help. Too much professor turnover? Trying to build your reputation as a research institution? Need to recruit and engage students better? It’s all possible with rewards and incentives. Here are six use cases for college and university leaders to consider. Improving Academic Research Programs Conducting research is a major part of many higher ed institutions, with everyone from graduate students to professors to full-time academic researchers getting in on the game. Rewards and incentives can benefit all those programs by increasing survey response rates and participation in clinical studies and focus groups, ultimately boosting the quantity and quality of data. Just be sure that any incentives and tools that your teams use comply with your Institutional Review Board and any other applicable regulations. READ MORE: Check out all the ways academic researchers can benefit from rewards Easing the Transition Back to Campus The pandemic threw colleges and universities for a loop, and while most have returned to campus,...
The end-of-year push isn’t just about driving new sales and hitting those tough Q4 sales goals. It’s also prime time to collect data and nurture relationships. And that’s where the dynamic duo of customer feedback surveys and holiday gifting campaigns can help. Many direct-to-consumer retailers and other businesses run customer feedback surveys throughout the year. But for B2B companies in particular, whose clients often complete only one yearly transaction (either a new purchase, a renewal, or an upgrade), a single survey burst in Q4 makes sense. Those same companies may or may not have some sort of customer appreciation efforts that overlap or immediately follow the survey. So why not kill two birds with one stone? By combining your feedback collection efforts and gifting campaigns, you can better nurture your client relationships going into the new year. Check out these tips for doubling your customer engagement efforts in Q4. READ MORE: 5 Steps to a Successful Holiday Gifting Campaign Choose an Order and Timing That Works Best Depending on your audience, the seasonality of your business, and your team’s workload, you have to decide whether it’s more appropriate to start with your customer feedback surveys or your holiday gifts, and...
When you decide to add digital rewards to your research, marketing, or employee programs, you’re thinking about what they can do for you: improve survey response rates, make it easier to recruit focus group participants, drive more leads and referrals, increase team engagement, and so on. Once you get the result you want, you hit “send” on the rewards and never have to think about them again, right? Who cares if your recipients actually get and redeem them? Low claim rates likely won’t affect your current project, since those recipients have already filled out the survey or submitted their referral. And geez, if you use BHN Rewards, which automatically refunds the value of unredeemed rewards into your account, low claim rates could even save you money! Well, as a matter of fact, you still should care. Here are three reasons why. READ MORE: Still Worried About Your Rewards Budget? Protect It With These 4 Tips Follow Through and Show Your Gratitude At the end of the day, giving digital rewards is about thanking your recipients — thanking customers for their business and advocacy, thanking research participants for their time and effort, thanking employees for their hard work. But it’s an...
Technology has become a key part of any research project, but tools using advances such as artificial intelligence and automation are just that — tools. While they make certain processes much easier, they don’t replace the need for human oversight. Researchers still need to fully understand how their market research technology is managing those processes. If you don’t have enough transparency and visibility, you may be hurting your project without even realizing it. That’s why it’s important to evaluate any new market research technology carefully before implementing it, whether it’s a survey tool, an insights community platform, or an incentives provider. When you’re using tools that don’t give you enough transparency, the entirety of your project could be at risk, including these three aspects. READ MORE: Our Top 7 Tips for Market Research and Effective Incentives Data Integrity and Protection Knowing exactly what data you’re collecting and how it’s being stored and used is more vital than ever, thanks to increasing privacy regulations and security issues. As most research methods, even qualitative ones, are now conducted online, the dangers have escalated. It’s not just what fields you require your participants to fill in, but also what information your market research...
The saying seems to get more and more true every year: It’s a small world. And it’s even more accurate for global companies that use modern communication tools to bring together teams that span time zones, countries, and continents. But when you’re trying to distribute rewards and gifts for international employees across the globe, it can make the world feel a lot bigger again. Here are three ways you may be falling short on your gifts for international employees — whether you realize it or not. READ MORE: How to Make Virtual Gifts for Remote Employees More Special Giving In-Office Perks That Exclude International Team Members Now that the pandemic is officially over, many companies have invited or required employees to return to the office, at least part time. Some are helping to ease the transition with perks such as free food or in-person social events. But when those perks are initiated by individual team leaders who also manage some employees in other countries, they can seem unfair. Imagine being one of a few people who are signed into the meeting virtually from abroad, watching everyone else in the conference room chowing down on their catered lunch. A more inclusive...
