Your Incentive to Use Gift Card Incentives.
Before Gift Cards
- “Get one month free”
- “No enrollment fee”
- “Discounted membership”
Elementary Incentives
You believe these are your “tried and true” incentives. The rationale is relatively simple, consumers love a bargain and you’re still within your profit margin.
No Future Motivation
What else does it motivate? Does it build customer loyalty, inspire return business, inspire positive testimonials, increase credibility? Not so much.
Diminishes
While discounts can motivate an indecisive customer, it ultimately cuts from your bottom line and does little to affect your overall reputation or the customer’s feelings towards your business.
Today’s Way: Gift Cards
- “Receive an Amazon.com gift card when you join, today.”
- “Refer a friend this month and you’ll both receive a Target gift card.”
Advanced Incentives
The basic rationale remains the same, consumers love a bargain. Offering an incentive such as gift cards is a low cost part of marketing.
Builds Future Relationships
What else does it motivate? Incentives build customer loyalty, inspire return business, inspire positive testimonials, increase credibility.
Increase Brand Power
Gift card incentives motivate indecisive customers, and bring you more. When a customer sees your brand next to that of a well known, respected company a mental pairing is made. Their motivation extends beyond the product you’re selling to the brand loyalty already established by the brand name on the card.
Long Term
The incentive of a gift card has duration. Your discount, once given, is out of mind. A gift card is on the customer’s mind from the time they see the offer until they receive their purchase. When they’re shopping, when they receive their purchase, they know they got this from you. This builds a relationship between the customer and your brand that leads to loyalty, repeat visits, word of mouth advertising and more benefits of good will.
Infinite Possibilities
Another benefit of the incentive based model is its repeatable but non-redundant nature. If you run a $0 enrollment fee promotion, that fee can only be negated once. Promotions such as “join and bring a friend” would result in discounting additional fees, further decreasing the client’s value, and decreasing their motivation to continue your prescribed action.
With the gift card incentive, a customer could receive multiple rewards, each applied only to the profit from the action you wish to motivate. If a new member joins and refers as many as 15 friends, you aren’t looking to remove 15 fees that don’t exist or gifting a no cost, free membership into times unknown. Instead, each referred member costs you one incentive which the referring member easily and eagerly compiles together.
Popularity
People love gift cards. They are consistently ranked among the most requested gifts for every occasion from Mother’s Day, Birthdays and Graduations and many people even buy them for themselves. The high desirability makes them an ideal incentive.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]