What do you take into account when choosing which incentive to use for your promotion?
1. Relevance to Customer Base
The idea of making an incentive synch with your own brand isn’t the only point of relevance to take into account. The incentive should be relevant to multiple demographic details of your customer base.
For instance, whether or not your customers are the same people carrying iPhones would indicate a yea or nay for iTunes gift cards.
2. Appropriateness of $$ Amount
Choosing the amount you want to spend on an incentive involves multiple factors, most notably your expected return on investment (ROI). Once you’ve made that determination, you must consider it in your incentive choice.
For example, a $10 giftcard to Starbucks can easily translate to a coffee and snack. The same dollar amount at Foot Locker would basically only equate to a $10 discount on their mostly higher priced inventory.
3. Ease of Use for Customer
An incentive won’t motivate if the customer doesn’t think they’ll be able to use it. This factor deserves extra consideration for franchises and chain stores whose locations may not all share the same local merchant set.
Whole Foods, for example, chooses very specific demographic areas when building its stores. This means that, unless your business serves only those same demographics, a Whole Foods gift card would be difficult to use for certain customers due to location.
Using e-gift cards in place of plastic gift cards is a further convenience for the customer. With 68% of adults currently carrying smartphones, being able to carry your card on your phone instead of a physical gift card to carry and potentially lose is an easy choice.
Ensuring ease of use may mean using different incentives for different locations, or choosing very broadly appealing incentives, depending on the scope of your locations.
4. Perceived Value
Perceived value is the basis of using an incentive. If the customer sees the incentive as valuable, then it incentivizes.
The value a customer places on an incentive isn’t just the face value. It’s how the customers can see themselves using it.
This is where things like brand pairing come into play. An incentive with a very strong brand identity such as Amazon.com will instantly draw attention. Additionally, offering an Amazon.com gift card can have a higher perceived value than a discount of an equal dollar amount. While a discount is instantly spent, that gift card has virtually unlimited possibilities.
5. Ease of Use for Your Business
An incentivized promotion should cost your business as few hours to manage as possible. Using an outside management firm for gift card promotions can take many of the burdens of incentives off of your hands.
Tasks like procuring the gift cards and negotiating marketing language will have already been handled. Companies like Promotion Vault provide additional services for you such as validating if a customer qualifies for the incentive, distributing the incentive and handling any related customer service inquiries.