Launch an Incentive Program: 5 Drill-Down Questions From an Expert

Have you decided to start an incentive program? Incentivizing with digital rewards is one of the simplest and most cost-effective ways to achieve better business results.

Making the decision to incentivize an audience is easy. Deciding exactly how you’re going to incentivize can be another story.

Most of our clients have specific goals for their programs, but have questions around how best to reach them. What types of incentives will they use? How and when should they send them? And what metrics will they track to determine if their incentive program is actually working?

This is where an incentive specialist can help you figure out your next steps.

My team and I offer dedicated support for incentive programs of all types and sizes. I work daily with CEOs, marketers, HR professionals, program managers, and other specialists to help them plan and develop effective incentive programs that achieve their goals.

Matthew Brossard, Director of Sales Development.

Let's walk through the five key questions I ask my clients to help them design effective and impactful incentive programs.

— Matthew Brossard, Director of Business Development ｜ Giftbit

Question #1: What are your business goals?

If you have a standard incentive program and goal in mind, then your business goals are likely pretty standard, too. When that's the case, we can usually skip to the next question.

A gift card platform like Giftbit is usually ‘use-case agnostic.’ In other words, it works well for lots of different types of companies and organizational objectives. The way you deliver your incentives will be the same regardless of whether your goals are to boost employee morale to improve employee retention, get out of a sales slump, increase your survey response rates, or something else.

One key question to consider: are you viewing an incentive program as a potential new revenue stream?

In cases where your business plans to offer ‘rewards as a service’ (common for use cases like referrals, hiring incentives, and job searches, for example), then you’re likely looking to turn your incentives themselves into a separate revenue stream.

If that’s the case, you’ll want to speak with someone on our team to ensure that you’re maximizing your profit and not missing any development opportunities.

Of course, Giftbit can offer this type of profit sharing to any type of program—if that’s a primary concern (typically for larger programs), always reach out.

What about research incentives?

female researcher using laptop in lab

What if you don’t really have ‘business’ goals, per se?

For example, we often work with clients in medical and academic institutions who need to provide digital payouts to their research participants. These tend to be smaller projects, and they tend to have much stricter requirements around participant anonymity.

If that’s your situation, please check out these resources:

We also work with government and nonprofit organizations, often for things like commuter incentives and other green initiatives. These types of organizations often have their own questions around vendor compliance and security.

Here, too, we’re always happy to jump on a call to work out any details.

If you plan to monetize your incentives or you have specific concerns around data anonymity and compliance, email your question or book a call.

Question #2: Who are you sending to?

Are you targeting an internal audience, such as employees and top performers, or an external audience, like customers and prospects??

If you’re in Human Resources, then you probably already know that effective employee incentive programs are incredibly important for increasing employee engagement, fostering more teamwork, boosting any workplace wellness initiatives, and reducing burnout. We know from decades of research from Gallup and countless others that engagement, employee satisfaction, and culture all matter.

Simply put, employee incentive programs work.

Of course, there can be tax and other implications associated with employee recognition programs. If you’re planning to reward employee performance, check out the following resources, and be sure to book a call with any follow-up questions:

Now let’s assume you are rewarding an external audience. Maybe you want to send referral bonuses or simplify your corporate gifting, improve your points-to-reward programs, or better collect user feedback. In other words, you'll be sending monetary rewards to people who aren't in your organization.

If that’s the case, you’re in the right place and asking the right questions: we've helped countless businesses grow and hit their targets with our flexible, digital gift cards. If you want to boost customer loyalty and/or accelerate business growth, then you’ve got lots and lots of options to do that well.

Follow-up: where are your recipients?

NEW OPT Stock with gradient (3)

Giftbit’s incentive catalog includes hundreds of brands from around the world and the ability to reward globally.

If you don’t know where all your recipients are located, you may want to consider the high performance Giftbit USD Virtual Prepaid Mastercard®. You can send it anywhere in the world that accepts Mastercard (which is most places), and your recipients can use it anywhere in the world that accepts Mastercard, including online, in-store, and through their mobile wallets.

Meanwhile, we offer easy international funding and currency conversion, and our catalog includes hundreds of the world's most popular brands. We now have gift cards available in GBP, Euro, AUD, Brazilian Real, and Indian Rupee, with more on the way.

If you have any questions about global sending or funding for international currencies, please reach out.

Question #3: What types of incentives should you send?

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Some clients have specific incentive requirements for their recipients, but otherwise many haven't considered which types of rewards to offer.

Digital rewards work best for customer incentives because they’re cost-effective and allow for instantaneous delivery and redemption (which most recipients now expect). They offer the perks of cash rewards, reimbursements, monetary bonuses, and even non-monetary incentives—all rolled into one easy-to-scale product.

If you’re opting for digital gift cards, consider this key choice:

Will rewards encourage time-sensitive actions, like a sign-up bonus or survey completion?

Or will they reward earned actions like a work milestone, or sales payout?

How you answer this question will determine whether you want rewards and incentives with claim periods that expire, or ones that never expire.

When to use promotional rewards (expiring)

happy employee using phone in office

Promotional rewards are designed to encourage engagement. These rewards incentivize customers to make purchases or redeem benefits sooner rather than later.

There are two main reasons to use promotional incentives:

To create urgency, especially in campaigns targeting prospects
To help manage campaign costs

When to use standard rewards (no expiry)

Standard incentives are best used when your recipient is expecting a payout, and/or has earned the reward such as years of service awards, referrals, or research participation.

In either case, promotional or standard, you can always expect some amount of unclaimed rewards—this leaves some "money on the table".

Different gift card distributors treat this "money on the table" differently—so be sure to ask how your provider manages that revenue. Hint: find a partner that is transparent about these details. You'll especially want to ask if they share back some of this value with you.

Giftbit’s model from Day One has been to be transparent about unclaimed offers, and to share a portion of that revenue with our clients. We’ve always been open with our clients, both in how much money we’re making, and how we can help them make and save more, too. See our pricing model.

Note: on the ‘terms and conditions’ side of things that your gift card provider handles, it’s not the reward itself that expires, but the value attached to it. For example, if you send a $25 Amazon.com gift card, your recipient will have a set amount of time to claim it before the offer is no longer available. Once they have their gift card in hand, that gift card won’t expire.

man using phone while grocery shopping

More decisions: what value should you set?

Ideally, the size of any incentive will correspond with the effort you’re asking for.

For example, a common telecom incentive strategy is to offer customers up to $500 in prepaid cards as an incentive to switch providers. We all know what a pain it can be to sign up for a new cell phone plan, so you generally need a bigger financial incentive to make it worth a potential new customers’ hard work and time.

But we also have lots of clients doing quick survey incentives that only ask for a few minutes of time, and they therefore only need to offer a few dollars to make it worthwhile.

Bonus: Giftbit lets you send gift cards in low denominations—even as low as $1. Being able to offer such small incentives is not very common in the industry. So especially if you’re doing a program where you want to offer smaller, ongoing rewards, be sure to look for a gift card company that will give you this option.

Question #4: What are your sending and branding requirements?

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Choosing the optimal delivery method for your incentives is crucial to the success of any rewards or recognition program. Aim to provide recipients with a seamless, top-notch experience from start to finish.