Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you probably know that company budgets are tight these days across many industries and fields. Teams are looking to cut costs, increase ROI, and share resources wherever possible, and your gift card platform offers a prime opportunity to do just that.
When you can share the tool with other departments, you can also share the cost. But first you have to show them how using rewards — and, more specifically, a gift card platform — can help them reach their own goals. Here are some suggestions to help you convince teams across the company that they need a rewards tool in their tech stack, too.
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With so much growth in martech, there are endless tools to help you streamline your processes and boost engagement. A rewards management platform can do both, making your campaigns and customer engagement efforts more effective without a large time investment. Integrations allow you to automate reward delivery via Marketo, HubSpot, Zapier, Talkable, Yotpo, and other tools in your tech stack. Offer gift cards for attending a webinar, subscribing to a newsletter, following your brand on social media, posting in the customer forum, submitting a referral, leaving an online review, and more.
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Many sales teams are already struggling with an overabundance of technologies to learn and manage. Nearly two-thirds (66%) of sales reps say they’re drowning in tools, which is no surprise, considering they use an average of 10 to close deals, according to Salesforce. So why bother adding a gift card platform into the mix? Because using incentives can help boost engagement with both prospects and customers. It can help reps reduce meeting no-shows, create a sense of urgency among waffling prospects, show customer appreciation, encourage brand loyalty and advocacy, and more. Giving reps the power of rewarding ultimately leads to more success and revenue.
The key, though, is incorporating rewards into the workflows and tools they already know and use every day. A gift card platform that integrates directly with your CRM lets you enable your sales teams without the need for them to use yet another complicated tool.
Your user experience and product teams rely on doing market research and collecting customer feedback to improve your company’s offerings. But to get reliable insights from that data, they need to make sure that they’re hearing from a representative sample. These initiatives are often challenged by low response rates or “squeaky-wheel syndrome.” The latter means you end up with feedback from a disproportionate number of unhappy customers, since people are typically more likely to complete a survey or review after a bad experience.
Gift card incentives help combat those issues, so you get a wider range of responses and improve both the quantity and quality of your data. The right platform can even connect directly to your survey tool to automate reward delivery after survey completion.
Good customer service isn’t just about solving the problem quickly and correctly, it’s also about giving the customer a good experience. Sometimes that means making it right with a customer who is unhappy. While discounts are often offered for appeasement, it’s far more powerful to send a more flexible reward, like a gift card. It comes across as more genuine and less self-serving.
But any attempt at appeasing a customer must be done right. With a gift card platform, you can send a reward instantly and personalize the message. Also, by choosing an integrated tool, you’ll be able to track those rewards in the same place as all your other interactions.
When you’re trying to justify the investment of a gift card platform, don’t forget about internal use cases. Just like other departments, human resources teams can use rewards to enhance the effectiveness of existing initiatives, including employee recognition, referrals, training, and wellness. Having the right tool makes it easy to distribute gift cards to employees no matter where they are located.
(And if HR still needs to be convinced that gift cards are the best option for employee rewards, check out the arguments here and here!)
With BHN Rewards, every department can distribute rewards within the same account, thanks to enterprise features like workspaces. Check out our pro tips on setting up our gift card platform for multiple teams!
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.
