A Buyer’s Guide to Quality Incentive Platforms: Create the Use Case – Part One

With increased engagement and acquisition costs and shifts in privacy management, now is a perfect time to invest in quality incentive program technology to future-proof your company’s internal and external engagement initiatives.

Loyalty and incentive programs are vital to future-proofing a brand. It’s not enough to rely on a decentralized one-off view of single application type incentive programs to manage programs such as:

• Health and wellness
• Employee recognition
• Sales incentives
• Channel
• Consumer promotions to guarantee your employee, member, and customer lifetime value.

Now, when companies look to create an incentive program or expand existing programs in an organization, they look to our advanced Platform technology developed on the foundation of security standards that can build and engage an internal and external participant base to drive brand revenue, engagement, growth, and longevity.

The primary difference between an incentive management platform and a single applications solution lies in flexibility and scalability. Single incentive application solutions can tackle a specific incentive, reward processing, and fulfillment application.

In contrast, our Platform solutions offer a robust technical foundation of several application solutions supporting different engagement use cases that can roll out across industries and organizational structures quickly and simultaneously. Whether upgrading or creating an incentive program, our solutions are ready to exceed your company’s needs.

Incentive and loyalty programs are ideal relationship-building tools to overcome monumental challenges because they provide a transparent value exchange for participants.

Loyalty has always been difficult to measure, and results can take months or years in the future to understand outcomes. If original estimates are wrong, the costs of providing such benefits could be a severe hardship to your business after creating an incentive program.

Participants are far more likely to voluntarily offer their time to live a healthier lifestyle or put in the extra sales effort to close more sales if offered a quality incentive program with rewards. It is a fact that organizations using rewards such as gift cards, points, or a day off have far better outcomes.

Customer acquisition costs (CAC) increased over 60% in the past six years and show no signs of slowing. These rising costs also have high churn rates and a loss of participation.

Because quality incentive programs have moved primarily online to interact with participants – participants notice when technology, convenience, or delays affect their experiences. They have more options to provide valuable review input that can affect your program’s success in attracting and retaining participants.

Before COVID, businesses could allocate acquisition resources relative to cost, but market uncertainty overhauled their ability to budget. Organizations have had to account for unpredictable and rising CAC, making their budget more and more prone to wasted resources.

Organizations can combat rising, unpredictable costs by shifting their focus on retention. The participant engagement journey will remain complex, and enterprise businesses must focus on maintaining engagement from the top of the funnel to the bottom and vice versa. Retention must become as important as acquiring customers to drive lasting revenue and engagement in a quality incentive program.

What benefits can you expect from creating an enterprise-level reward incentive program? Outcomes can include:

• Increased operational efficiency
• Lower incentive costs
• Higher participant engagement
• Customer profitability
• Richer data
• Better insights

Your business should have a retention strategy in place, but a plan alone is the first step.

A successful retention strategy needs to consider how a quality incentive program can help build a journey of emotional loyalty. Also, a loyalty and incentive program is how your business can successfully execute your plan to accomplish your engagement and retention goals.

With an effective enterprise loyalty technology solution, your organization can expect a variety of outcomes, including the ability to:

• Increase operational efficiency
• Lower incentive costs
• Observe higher participant engagement
• Improve customer profitability
• Analyze richer data
• Generate clearer insights

These internal metrics are an imperative focus for every business. Loyalty and quality incentive programs are key retention metrics that enable a company to accomplish its goals.

Retention is not just a customer initiative. Incentive programs are vital and the secret sauce to future-proofing a brand. Organizations need to rely on internal health and wellness, sales incentives, and employee recognition programs to keep the internal teams contributing, productive, happy, and staying put.

They must also focus on external programs that improve average order value, repeat purchase rate, and overall customer profitability to guarantee lifetime value.

Loyalty and incentive programs are essential business channels in your organization to build and engage a reliable broad participant base that drives brand profitability, optimism, engagement, growth, and longevity.

The decline of cookies and data accessibility means an organization needs to protect and collect participant and customer data in new ways. Quality incentive programs provide deep insights into behavioral attributes, product interests, engagement history, and purchase behavior that cookies could previously offer.

It has never been more critical to engage the services of a loyalty and incentive technology provider that understands data controls for loyalty and incentive programs and regulations that can influence the engagement journey of employees, members, and customers.

You’ve identified data silos. You must now build a single source of truth. Whether you study an employee or a customer, incentive profiles store all their data in one place.

After creating an incentive program, document your customers from when they joined, which social channels they follow, and their contributions and engagement behavior throughout their journey through your program.

A quality incentive programrewards users at every touchpoint. The top contender for your loyalty and incentive technology solution should have the capabilities to integrate your crucial tech stacks to support your organizations like HCM, CMS, CDP, point-of-sale, and customer service helpdesk software.

The rise of mobile communication and commerce is driving the adoption of new channels, especially engaging with SMS communications, as keys to successful sales, engagement, and retention strategies. A quality incentive program presents a direct opportunity for organizations to incentivize SMS engagements by offering rewards.

The Pew Research Center reports that 97% of smartphone owners use their devices to text every week. According to Text Request, 91% of people who text say they prefer doing that to leaving a message on voicemail, as it is the most used form of communication for U.S. adults under age 50. Additionally, Text Request reported that nearly 70% of employees want texting for interoffice communication, and 80% of professionals currently use texting for business purposes.

This level of direct communication is vital to think about as you create an incentive program. Choosing SMS communication can drive increases in behavioral outcomes, engagement, and conversion rates.

Organizations must face the reality that modes of communication change, and management will need to adjust their internal and external loyalty and quality incentive program communication methods accordingly.

For any incentive program to be effective, incentives must be clearly defined and considered a viable, valuable reward for the associated effort from users. In part two of this guide, you’ll find out how to build the best possible platform.