You thought you had done everything right. You incorporated incentive rewards into your survey, research, or marketing program to thank participants for their time and contribution. Your results improved, but now there’s a puzzling issue that you didn’t anticipate:
Recipients don’t seem to be using their incentive rewards.
So why wouldn’t someone claim a free gift? Check out these four reasons that a recipient may not redeem their reward, jeopardizing the effectiveness of your program.
READ MORE: Why Should I Want High Claim Rates for My Digital Rewards?
The very first step to making sure your recipients use their incentive rewards is to offer something that they actually want. This is also important because the reward has to be compelling enough to persuade them to take whatever action you want them to take, whether it’s completing a survey, attending a webinar or demo, submitting a referral, or something else.
The solution: Research shows that gift cards are more popular than ever because recipients like the flexibility to choose what they buy. Even better, offer them even more flexibility by letting them select what kind of gift card they want. And gift cards aren’t just a great option for recipients: They help you, too, because they’re easy to deliver digitally anywhere in the world and can be sent in any denomination, allowing you to set a value that’s appropriate for the requested action.
After moving to gift card rewards, you still have to remember that most of them can be used only in a single country. For instance, if you sent an Amazon.com gift card to a recipient in Europe, they can’t use it on their own country-specific version of the site, like Amazon.co.uk.
The solution: When you have recipients in multiple countries, you need to either send different card types for each or opt for a more universal option, such as a Mastercard or Visa prepaid reward. You can also choose a distribution tool like BHN Rewards, which can streamline international rewarding by detecting each recipient’s location and automatically curating a list of available reward options in their country.
You expect there to be delivery issues if you’re sending physical checks or gifts as incentive rewards, but even once you’ve gone digital, problems can arise. Not only do you have to ensure you have the right email address for each recipient, you also need to minimize the chances of your reward emails getting caught in spam filters.
The solution: Start by integrating your reward delivery into your survey or marketing platform. That way, whatever email address your recipient enters will automatically transfer to your rewards tool, eliminating errors from manual entry. Secondly, make sure reward emails are sent from your own authorized domain instead of a third-party or spoofed address, which increases the likelihood that they’ll be flagged as spam.
If recipients don’t recognize the email delivering your incentive rewards, they may ignore or delete it by mistake. The same can happen if it takes too long to arrive after they submitted the survey, attended the webinar, or completed whatever other task you were incentivizing, since they may not remember that the reward email is coming.
The solution: Integration and automation help here as well because they allow the rewards to be sent immediately after an action is completed. The “from” address is also important yet again, so the recipient recognizes the business that sent it. To make the email even more recognizable, make sure to customize it with your branding and a message that reminds recipients how they earned the reward.
Everyone has done it — filed an email away or told yourself that you’d deal with it later, only to have it get buried under a million newer messages. The simple matter is that many recipients don’t claim and spend their incentive rewards because they just forget!
The solution: Set a claim window that gives recipients plenty of time to redeem their digital gift card. Also, use a tool that sends automatic reminders to recipients who haven’t yet gone through the redemption process. You’ll create a better rewards experience without the extra hassle of sending reminders manually.
The BHN Rewards platform offers a great experience for both sender and recipient! Request a demo today to see how it works.
Hannah is a reformed journalist who has more than 15 years of experience and now focuses on content marketing for innovative tech companies.
Hannah is a reformed journalist who has more than 15 years of experience and now focuses on content marketing for innovative tech companies.
