When you decide to add digital rewards to your research, marketing, or employee programs, you’re thinking about what they can do for you: improve survey response rates, make it easier to recruit focus group participants, drive more leads and referrals, increase team engagement, and so on.
Once you get the result you want, you hit “send” on the rewards and never have to think about them again, right? Who cares if your recipients actually get and redeem them? Low claim rates likely won’t affect your current project, since those recipients have already filled out the survey or submitted their referral. And geez, if you use BHN Rewards, which automatically refunds the value of unredeemed rewards into your account, low claim rates could even save you money!
Well, as a matter of fact, you still should care. Here are three reasons why.
READ MORE: Still Worried About Your Rewards Budget? Protect It With These 4 Tips
At the end of the day, giving digital rewards is about thanking your recipients — thanking customers for their business and advocacy, thanking research participants for their time and effort, thanking employees for their hard work. But it’s an empty gesture if you send the reward just hoping that they won’t see or redeem it. As Bryan Tyner, Director of Research at Kickstarter, puts it: “We want to respect the time of the people we interview and express the gratitude that we promised.”
Making sure that your customers, prospects, or survey respondents actually receive their digital rewards is key to building trust for the long term. You want them to trust that your offer for a reward is legitimate, receive their gift card quickly, and have an overall positive reward experience. That way, they will be more likely to help you again later. Nurturing those relationships can eventually boost future leads and sales, customer and employee loyalty, recruitment efforts, and so much more.
Any time you have to spend resolving delivery or redemption errors, answering participants who want to know where their incentive is, and resending lost rewards is time that you aren’t able to spend on your work. Fielding those requests can be a big time burden for you or your support teams. The higher your claim rate is, the fewer people you have potentially emailing or calling you to ask where their reward is. Even better, when recipients claim their digital rewards soon after receiving them, it makes it less likely that they’ll lose track and need you to resend it.
1. Make sure your delivery emails are recognizable. If they come from a third-party domain or aren’t customized with your branding, they may be easily missed or deleted. You want recipients to have no doubt that the email is from your business or organization. BHN Rewards lets you send from your own authorized domain instead of a spoofed address, which also helps ensure that emails don’t get stuck in spam filters. Plus, users who use their custom domain see a 17% higher claim rate than those who don’t.
2. Set a reasonable claim window. Give recipients ample time to redeem their digital gift card. BHN Rewards defaults to 90 days, but you can change it to allow even more time — up to a year! — if you want.
3. Send automated reminders. Sending follow-up emails to recipients who haven’t yet redeemed their digital rewards is a nice courtesy. Choose a tool like BHN Rewards that sends automated reminders without any extra effort from you. Otherwise, it can be nearly impossible to do manually, especially if you don’t even have visibility into whose rewards have been claimed already.
See how Kickstarter used BHN Rewards to boost their incentive claim rates to 90%!
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.
