Promoting Incentives: How to Leverage Your Existing Resources for a Successful Campaign 

You can have the best incentive in the world, but if you don’t properly promote it to your customers, no one will know about it.   

Whether you want to move quickly into the market with an engagement tactic, or through a more customized approach, there are certain methods that will give you the most exposure.   

These solutions are strategically designed and seamlessly executed to influence consumer behavior and provide your brand with measurable insights.   

Incentivized engagement tactics are meant to be sharable digital experiences that entice consumers, so why not advertise them in the most effective ways possible?   

These tips below will help your brand effectively get the word out on any incentive.  

  

Use Multichannel and Partnerships  

Leverage all available channels to promote any incentive: owned, paid and earned.   

Paid media is when you pay to reach an audience through, for example, display ads or commercials.   

Owned media are platforms you own and control like your website.   

Earned media is when a third party spreads your company brand message for you through, for example, a television interview or reviews on Yelp or Google.   

You should also consider partner inclusion to reach a new and targeted audience. Strategic partnerships can go a long way toward capturing member attention and motivate consumer behavior.   

You can leverage a partnership to acquire customers and spark sales during a slow daypart.   

For example, T-Mobile Tuesdays aims to reduce churn and increase customers. Its goal was to thank customers through a unique loyalty program that differentiates the brand in a highly competitive category.    

T-Mobile Tuesdays is a first-of-its-kind loyalty program that rewards customers with new benefits every Tuesday using its scalable offer platform.   

It focuses on finding new ways to reward subscribers through innovative engagements and partnerships to enrich the reward experience.   

T-Mobile can segment and publish offers and micro-experiences by user, location and customer preferences.  

Give It the Billboard Test  

Make sure your prizing passes the billboard test.   

To ensure the success of any incentivized engagement, the first step is driving people to participate. One of the best ways to capture attention and drive entries is to keep your prizing messaging simple and compelling – consumable within a few seconds (like looking at a billboard on the highway) – along with a quick and easy call-to-action.   

There are three elements of prizing messaging:    

• Size of prize (grand prize or total prize value)  
• Number of winners  
• Frequency of winning (e.g., daily, weekly, monthly)  

Your optimal prizing structure should combine a sense of attainability (either through the number of winners or frequency of winning) and a motivating prize value.   

According to our research, 75% of consumers definitely/probably would participate in a promotion where one winner earns $10,000 and 100 people each win $100.   

Meanwhile, 73% definitely/probably would participate in a promotion where 100 people win $2,000 each.   

Sixty-eight percent definitely/probably would participate in a promotion where 100 people win $200 each.   

And 56% definitely/probably would participate in a promotion where 1,000 people win $20 each.  

  

Have a Clear Call To Action  

Now your incentive is ready to launch to the world and you’re excited about engaging as many consumers as possible.   

So, what’s next?   

A clear call to action.   

This may seem like a simple task, but it is crucial to move your customers through to the next step of their journeys connected to your incentive. Your call to action should be simple and engaging.   

You want to use your call to action to engage consumers and push them to the next step smoothly and easily.   

There are two ways to track the effectiveness of your engagement tactics: tagging and benchmarking.   

Tagging is when you tag media to track the effectiveness and impact of incentives to optimize your spend.   

When you look at program performance while a program is live and at the conclusion, it’s helpful to look at visitor-level metrics driven by each media channel (typically using Google Analytics).    

Without tagging, the majority of traffic is lumped into a “direct” bucket.  

By tagging media, you can see traffic driven by each channel and understand what media is driving the highest conversion to registration.   

Also, set benchmarks and projections to determine if your promotion will reach brand goals and adjust media accordingly.  

  

Three Simple Steps to Effectively Promote Your Incentive  

If you remember these three steps, you will be doing all you can to effectively promote any incentive.   

Leverage all available channels: Owned, paid and earned media.

Give your promotion the “Billboard Test” that revolves around simple and compelling messaging. Key elements include the size of the prize, number of winners and the frequency of winning.   

And thirdly, have a clear, engaging call to action that incentivizes consumers.   

If you’d like to chat about incentives or any of your customer engagement efforts, reach out to our experts here any time.