Recruitment, participation, and compensation are three key pillars of running market research programs. Incentivizing research participation improves the quality of your insights and communicates to your users that you truly value their time and feedback; however, scaling incentive programs can be a challenge. But it doesn’t have to be. That was the challenge facing Bryan Tyner, the Director of Research at Kickstarter. He was brought on as its first dedicated research hire. Kickstarter, the most trusted platform for crowdfunding creative projects — everything from films, games, and music to art, design, and technology — tasked Tyner with addressing compensation for survey and interview participants. When he joined, market research incentives were described as “unfeasible and unscalable.” Coordinating payments to participants between project stakeholders and their finance team quickly became a huge burden as their research practice grew. With as many as 200 user interviews conducted in his first year, scalability mattered. From a Limited Rewarding Experience to BHN Rewards The first gift card platform Kickstarter used to provide compensation was simple and relieved much of their initial burden. But as they increasingly focused on their users’ experiences and feedback in planning and decision making, the simplicity of that platform began...
In 2022, mobile wallets accounted for roughly half of global e-commerce payment transactions, according to Statista. With payments going digital, it’s no surprise that rewards are too — 63% of respondents in a 2022 BHN survey reported wanting digital gift cards. As you continue to optimize your rewards program, including a prepaid virtual Visa or virtual Mastercard option is ideal. Recipients consistently say they like having flexibility when spending their rewards, a hallmark of both cards, which can be spent online or in person. Because these two prepaid cards are a little different from e-gift cards to retailers, restaurants, or service providers (and from each other), we’ve answered all the questions you might have before introducing them to your rewards recipients. READ MORE: Why You Should Go Digital With Prepaid Incentive Cards Q. What’s the Difference Between a Prepaid Virtual Visa and Virtual Mastercard? A. The short answer is nothing. Both a prepaid virtual Visa and virtual Mastercard can be spent wherever those cards are accepted. And because Visa and Mastercard are major credit card companies, they’re accepted at most places. If your audience is international, you may want to consider checking if one is preferred over the other in...
“The customer is always right” — it’s the first rule of being a customer service rep or account manager. Whether the customer’s problem was actually your fault or a result of user error or just a miscommunication, the goal must be to defuse the situation and make it right. Your customer retention rates and referral marketing efforts depend on it. That’s where rewards can help smooth things over with an unhappy customer. In particular, a digital prepaid card or gift card is an appealing reward for consumers and can be delivered easily and for free. But there’s more to it than that, of course. Here are three best practices to make sure you’re arming your frontline reps to effectively use digital rewards for customer appeasement. READ MORE: 3 Sales Challenges You Can Solve With B2B Corporate Gifting Don’t Make Your Customer Wait The last thing you want to tell an already unhappy customer is that you’ll send them a coupon or reward in four to six weeks. In these times of dwindling customer loyalty, even four to six days is too long when you’re at risk of losing business. According to Zendesk, 72% of customers want immediate service, and their...
Anyone in sales knows about the summer slump. “Let’s pick this back up after vacation” can make it challenging to close a deal. Whether you’re cross-selling to existing customers or bringing new prospects into the fold, adding a B2B gift card to your summer campaign can help your sales team meet — or exceed — their goals. Need some convincing? The Incentive Research Foundation’s 2023 Industry Outlook reports that 50% of respondents in North America believe high inflation increases the value of non-cash incentives (including gift cards), vs. only 23% who believe it makes them less valuable. Many of your customers and prospects are looking to stretch the value of a dollar, and a creative B2B gift card campaign could catch their attention and incentivize them to take action during the slower season. To help you generate excitement around your summer campaign, here are five theme ideas to get you started. Sunny Getaways Summer is the perfect time to engage with customers and prospects about their travel plans. When you’re checking in with them, mention you have a promotion that can help them plan their next vacation. Choose your incentives according to your budget and the value of your customer...
No aspect of your job should ever be called a “nightmare.” But for market researchers, manually managing survey rewards frequently becomes just that. Case in point: Farm Journal is a leading data insights company that collects first-party data to serve every audience in the agricultural industry. Managing and deploying quantitative and qualitative research for clients is a key aspect of Farm Journal’s services. However, providing incentives to drive more survey responses was quickly becoming a huge drain on time. Obstacles at Every Turn With Manual Gift Card Fulfillment Running hundreds of surveys per year — including juggling spreadsheets to manually track which respondents have received their gift card — can quickly become a full-time job. That was the experience of Amy Mills, a market research associate at Farm Journal who was spending hours and hours sending thousands of rewards a year. She used Amazon to fulfill all their gift card needs, describing the process as “just a nightmare.” Due to the large volume of rewards, her team frequently hit the maximum spend limit on Amazon, which restricts gift card purchases to $10,000 per customer per day. Faced with that daily obstacle, along with frustrated survey respondents awaiting their promised reward,...
Can you believe that the gift card didn’t debut until 1994? Neiman Marcus made the switch from gift certificates to cards first, but it was Blockbuster who began the practice of displaying them for purchase. Three decades later, gift cards have gone digital. If you’re not sure what that means, an e-gift card is the same as a gift card — just without the card. Instead, the recipient receives the digital e-gift card through email. Naturally, the e-gift card is becoming more and more popular, especially with younger generations. Fiserv reports that one in three consumers load such cards into a mobile or digital wallet. Here are nine reasons why rewarding with a digital e-gift card makes sense now. READ MORE: Gift Cards Are More Popular Than Ever 1. Free to Send Unlike a physical gift card, an e-gift card has no shipping or packaging costs. Depending on the size of your program, switching to virtual cards can add up to a significant line item on your budget. 2. Easier International Giving Sending a digital e-gift card through email simplifies the process of double-checking postal addresses in other countries, since the format can vary so much. Plus, with a global...
Between inflation and consumers’ post-COVID mindset, solving your biggest business challenges could come down to how well you pay attention to tips for market research and leverage effective incentives. After all, launching a new product, refining existing ones, and even determining how to expand your offering in new territories requires customer feedback and market insights. Whether you’re counting on surveys or qualitative research to figure out your next steps, be sure you’re following these tips for market research. Offer the Right Rewards Your first step should be to make sure that the rewards you’re incentivizing your customers with make sense. Be sure you are: 1. Giving a value that matches the level of effort, i.e., a higher reward for more time spent. How to Calculate Digital Reward ValueTime to complete taskxValue of respondents’ timex150%=Compelling reward value 2. Offering digital prepaid cards and gift cards so you can reward instantly as part of the research process. 3. Letting participants choose their own reward from a few curated options — and make sure those options are redeemable in their location. Keep Your Target Audience in Mind Are you trying to reach mothers with children under 5? College students? Men over 50 in...
In the B2B world, there’s no one right way to use rewards for customers and prospects. Actually, it’s the opposite: The best B2B corporate gifting strategy requires you to take a broader look at all the ways you can optimize the entire customer journey. For instance, if you’re spending your gifting budget only during the holiday season to thank your biggest and most loyal customers — as many B2B companies do — you’re missing out on a ton of opportunities throughout the year and the company. Likewise, B2B corporate gifting shouldn’t be the domain of one department. There are many teams who interact with your clients, and every interaction is equally important. Prioritizing the experience during those interactions is key, especially since customer-centric companies are 60% more profitable than others, according to HubSpot. Here are three departments you should involve first as you develop your gifting strategies and how they can use rewards to help them hit their goals. READ MORE: Why Client Gifts Aren’t Just for the Holidays Marketing B2B corporate gifting can help enhance your marketing efforts for both lead generation and customer engagement. Use rewards to increase email open rates, blog or newsletter subscriptions, webinar attendance, shares...
Amazon gift cards are many companies’ go-to gifts. After all, giving someone the ability to pick whatever they want from a site that sells just about everything certainly takes the guesswork out of reward giving. The trouble is that even though Amazon operates in many countries, there’s no true Amazon international gift card. Gift recipients can use their Amazon gift card only on the one country-specific site where it was purchased. That means that an Amazon.com gift card cannot be used on Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.ca or Amazon.co.jp. The only way for a recipient in another country to use an Amazon.com gift card would be to find a product on the U.S. site that can be shipped internationally. And that typically includes high shipping costs that eat up much of the card’s value. Until Amazon figures out how to offer an Amazon international gift card, here are two global rewarding options to consider instead. READ MORE: The Appeal of Virtual Prepaid Cards as Incentives Is as Simple as ABC Reward With Virtual Visa or Mastercard Prepaid Cards A virtual prepaid card such as Visa or Mastercard can be used in more than 150 countries. It’s the next best thing to giving...
Actionable Research was facing a constant battle trying to track completed survey responses and who received their reward afterward. “Managing post-survey incentives had been a serious time burden,” says Founder and CEO David Cristofaro. “Rewards that slip through the cracks become a reputation issue.” It was clear this market research consultancy needed a global incentives management platform that could handle rewards for all types of research — surveys, one-on-one interviews, group panels, and more. The Challenges of Handling Incentives Manually In-House Katie Crain, Senior Client and Project Manager for Actionable Research, says she continually faced several obstacles while distributing incentives without a management platform, including: Spending valuable time manually sending rewards one by one. Guessing what kind of rewards “recipients might like and might motivate them to participate.” Trying to send gift cards globally — “even using Amazon was a massive challenge for us.” Cristofaro adds: “If you’re distributing to the big five countries in Europe, you have to log in to all separate five Amazon sites, maintain a login, and translate everything.” “Maybe most important, if you have an honest mistake and rewards aren’t distributed, you could wind up in a situation where people are angry with you and...
