If you’re running any kind of rewards program, effective incentives management is a must. It’s proven that incentives are a great way to boost customer engagement and loyalty, increase survey response rates, and encourage research participation. But you don’t want those incentives to add a large administrative burden to your workday.
Managing the distribution of incentives can be time-consuming and take team members away from other business-critical tasks. By using a rewards management platform, you can harness the power of rewards in a streamlined, efficient way. Just make sure you’re taking full advantage of the tool. Here are three tips that will help to make it easier.
Being able to integrate rewards and incentives directly into your current tools makes it easy to automate and manage incentives. Choose a rewards management platform that can connect with whatever survey or marketing software you use, whether it’s Qualtrics, SurveyMonkey, HubSpot, Marketo, or something else. That way, you can set triggers that automatically deliver rewards when someone takes a certain action, such as completing a survey or submitting a referral.
Automating the incentive distribution process is key to streamlining your systems. It means you can run multiple campaigns simultaneously and effortlessly. You can also curate the selection of gift cards or other digital rewards for each campaign, or let the incentives management platform auto-curate a list based on the recipient’s location. You can even add company branding and messaging to personalize the gifting experience.
To manage incentives effectively, you must ensure you can track them thoroughly and accurately. You need to know who is receiving rewards, whether they have claimed their reward, and which option they chose. You also need to be able to report on the success of each survey, as well as your entire research or marketing program. Make sure you have an incentives management platform that gives you robust tracking and reporting capabilities at all three levels — by recipient, campaign, and program.
The best rewards management platforms give you flexible controls to tailor its functionality to your needs and goals. For instance, if you have a limited budget, you can set reward caps that distribute incentives to only the first 50 or 100 participants. You may also want to use built-in approval workflows so you can review and approve recipients before sending out their rewards.
If you run anonymous surveys, like for a clinical study or academic research program, you need an incentives management tool that supports that functionality. By decoupling personal information from the survey response and employing data masking, you can reward participants while ensuring that their data stays private.
It’s important to make sure you get a reliable rewards management platform that can meet your program’s needs and goals. With the right tool, you can easily ensure that you have effective, streamlined incentives management.
For more tips on what to look for in an incentives management platform, check out our Buyer’s Guides for marketers and market researchers!
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.
