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Using Digital Incentives: A Strategy to Improve Global Customer Engagement and Loyalty

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Using Digital Incentives: A Strategy to Improve Global Customer Engagement and Loyalty

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Nearly all aspects of business involve doing things digitally, including incentivizing a target audience. These powerful virtual enticers come in many forms. But what are digital incentives and what makes them so beneficial for your business and its customers?

Read also: How Employee Advocacy Enhances Brand Reputation and Engagement

In this post, you’ll learn what digital incentives are and why they are helpful for loyalty and engagement among customers. 

What Are Digital Incentives?

A digital incentive is any virtual-based reward. Companies can use such incentivization to motivate shoppers to push that “Add to Cart” button. These rewards also work to motivate customers to complete a certain action.

Examples of digital incentives:

  • Promotional codes
  • Virtual gift cards
  • Sweepstakes entries
  • Cashback rewards
  • Store credit
  • Access to premium digital content

How Digital Incentives Keep Customers Engaged and Loyal

With the basics taken care of, it’s vital to learn why rewards and incentives work so well. Here’s why digital incentives entice customers while keeping them loyal to your business.

Convenient for Customers and Companies

A cornerstone of business-related success means knowing what shoppers want. According to a 2020 poll conducted by Blackhawk Network, 72% of those surveyed prefer digital incentives over physical ones.

Because so many people work and unwind online, digital incentives are convenient for people using their computers, smartphones, or tablets. Plus, your business can instantly send rewards points, discount codes, and other incentives.

Additionally, companies don’t have to incur storage and shipping costs associated with sending out a bunch of gift cards, T-shirts, or other types of physical incentives or rewards.

Showing Customers They’re Valued

There’s no denying customers typically have plenty of shopping options. Whether your company sells to consumers or companies, recognizing their loyalty can make your business stand out from the pack. 

If you use digital incentives, you have many ways to pull off this strategy. Reward loyalty by offering:

  • Member-exclusive pre-sales
  • Exclusive content
  • VIP-exclusive sales and events
  • Access to early product or service releases

These loyalty-related perks let you offer something other businesses may not be able to match. This exclusivity can ensure your business remains more attractive to customers than a competing company.

Personalizing the Shopping Experience

According to Twilio Segment, 60% of consumers say they’d offer repeat business to companies offering personalized shopping experiences. Using digital incentives is an excellent way to provide something a sizable portion of your company’s target audience likely wants: personalized shopping.

Offering incentives is great. Letting customers choose how they want to reward themselves is even better. And, with extensive options in your incentive playbook, taking the digital route means giving your customers plenty of choices. Plus, it can help solve the problem of shoppers not using their physical rewards often or ever. 

Tips to Pull Off an Ideal Digital Incentivization Strategy

After learning the many benefits of virtual incentives, wanting to offer them is understandable. Follow the tips below to get your incentivization program prepped for a successful launch.

Learn What Your Audience Wants

Conducting research is imperative before most companies launch new products or services. The same should apply to digital incentives and rewards. While you can offer a multitude of digital-based rewards, starting with a few at a time might be best.

Unsure how to learn what your customers want? Try the following methods:

  • Utilize social listening
  • Conduct surveys
  • Ask your social media followers
  • Send an email to current or former customers

Keep an Eye on Your Incentive Campaigns

Most people don’t hit home runs their first time at bat. That’s also true in the business world. Rarely will brand-new digital incentive campaigns achieve 100% success. Fortunately, a great way to avoid poor program performance is by monitoring the analytics of your incentives and rewards.

Many digital incentive programs offer built-in analytics, letting your business know what’s working well. You can find out what offers participants prefer, which ones aren’t converting, and other vital information.

The Power of Gamification

Companies everywhere are gamifying what they offer, including their incentive programs. Gamification is more familiar than you may think. Examples of this technique include leaderboards, point systems, and achievements for added engagement.

However you do it, gamifying things taps into those neural pathways that activate when we receive rewards. Using achievements, another popular gamification method, also makes more mundane tasks enticing for people to complete.

Whether you’re new to digital incentive programs or not, they can skyrocket customer loyalty and engagement when done well. Before your next campaign launches, utilize the previously mentioned tips for a potentially successful kick-off. After a little time, effort, and adjustments, your incentives can attract customers from around the world.

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Customer Effort Score: What it is and How to Use it

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Broadly speaking, a customer effort score measures how easy or difficult it is for a customer to resolve a given issue with a company’s customer service team.

Have you ever waited your turn to speak to a customer service representative, only to be transferred to another agent? Have you ever waited on hold so long you that you hung up? Have you ever yelled “Agent” at a voice automation system until you were hoarse? You’re not alone.

Poor customer experiences like that are much more common than you might realize. In fact, bad customer interactions are putting over $4.7 trillion in sales at risk every single year.

The good news is there are simple strategies to improve how you interact with your customers. By calculating your Customer Effort Score (CES), you can assess how easy (or difficult) you’re making it for your customers and work toward improving your customer experience.

What is a Customer Effort Score?

HubSpot defines Customer Effort Score as a single-item service metric that measures how much work it takes for someone to get what they want from a business. In other words, it’s a reflection of how much effort a customer has to expend when interacting with your company.

The idea is simple: The more effort required to reach a certain outcome (such as making a purchase or resolving an issue), the more frustrating the customer experience. By contrast, a low-effort interaction makes for a better, smoother experience that casts your brand in a positive light.

Researchers from the Corporate Executive Board (CEB) first introduced the concept of a Customer Effort Score in 2010. According to their study, reducing effort is far more effective at increasing customer loyalty than trying to wow consumers with over-the-top service: “All customers really want is a simple, quick solution to their problem.” 

The only issue? Many times, customer service does the exact opposite. Whether it be because of long wait times, having to repeat oneself, or jumping through hoops, customers are four times more likely to leave a service interaction disloyal than loyal. 

That’s where CES comes into play. Tracking CES allows you to identify pain points in the customer experience, isolate troublesome channels, and make immediate and long-term improvements. 

Better yet, Gartner says that reducing customer effort also allows you to:

  • Increase repurchase rates
  • Improve customer loyalty
  • Lower service costs
  • Reduce employee turnover

Creating a CES survey

The first step in measuring your Customer Effort Score is designing a CES survey—a short questionnaire that asks current customers to rate the amount of effort involved in a recent interaction. Questions normally ask respondents to choose a rating on a scale that best represents their experience.

 Here are some examples of questions you might include on a survey:

  1. On a scale of 1-10, how easy was it for you to resolve your issue?
  2. How much effort did you have to put in to find an answer to your question?
  3. How easy was it to navigate our website and obtain the information you were looking for?

Typically, businesses send CES surveys at particular moments in the customer journey. These moments almost always come after the customer has taken a certain action, such as:

  • A customer support interaction like a phone call, chat, or email thread.
  • A transaction such as a completed purchase, downloaded white paper, or subscription sign up.
  • A website or mobile app interaction (this one is especially useful, as it helps you measure your interface’s ease of use and functionality).

Recency is important when it comes to gathering feedback. It’s best to immediately follow up an interaction with a questionnaire on the channel where it took place. This makes it easy for customers to fill out the survey without having to jump through additional hoops.

Calculating your score

Once your respondents have completed the survey, it’s time to analyze the results and calculate your company’s average Customer Effort Score. Don’t worry—you don’t have to be a math whiz to figure it out. 

Here’s the basic formula: Sum of all CES scores ÷ the total number of responses = average CES.

So, what does a good CES look like? It depends. Your survey’s parameters will influence how that score is weighted, but generally speaking, the higher the number, the better. 

Let’s say you’ve asked 100 respondents to rate interactions on a scale of 1-10, and the sum of all scores is 880. That’d give you an average CES of 8.8.Not too shabby!

How to use (and improve) your CES

Keep in mind that there’s no industry standard you have to live up to—only your own scores matter. 

If you find that your CES is teetering on the lower end of the spectrum, that just means you have work to do. Fortunately, there are plenty of ways to improve CES and reduce customer effort. Let’s take a look at two of the most impactful methods:

1. Automate tasks with customer self-service 

Customer self-service options are growing in popularity, especially among younger demographics. In fact,  66% of Millennials prefer self-service options for completing simple requests. People are using these alternative solutions more frequently today than just three years ago , so it’s increasingly important to offer these functionalities to your consumers.

Take AI-powered chatbots, for example. Often, chatbots can answer common support questions and handle basic requests faster and more efficiently than human agents. This frees up your contact center agents to focus on more complex issues, reduces wait times, and eliminates unnecessary effort.

2. Deliver an omnichannel experience

Taking an omnichannel approach to customer service means offering consumers a seamless, cohesive, and uniform experience across all possible touchpoints. 

Today’s customers want to transition from one channel to another without skipping a beat or having to repeat themselves. With a Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) solution, you can meet these expectations and offer a truly connected customer journey. As one comprehensive tool for customer experience management, a CCaaS platform enables agents to interact with consumers from any channel, all in one easy-to-use desktop view.

Enabling a low-effort customer experience

 Establishing low-effort customer experiences helps simplify the buyer’s journey. By offering new, existing, and prospective customers a path of least resistance for issue resolution, business leaders can significantly minimize effort, foster loyalty, and deliver more positive interactions. 

Of course, calculating CES is only half the battle. To truly understand and reap the benefits of a low-effort experience, organizations will need to get creative with how they optimize their customer experience strategy. Whether it be through self-service tools or omnichannel contact center solutions, technology is undoubtedly at the center of the equation.

Reilly Nolan, Content Marketing Manager, Webex by Cisco, a leader in cloud calling, collaboration, and customer experience solutions.

 

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Archives, Global Trade Daily, Special Reports

How to Keep Customers Engaged, Instead of Enraged, During Supply-Chain Issues

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Supply chain issues, an ongoing disruption caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, are expected to impact holiday shoppers this year. And at a time when companies annually hope for a significant uptick in revenue, marketers need to be on top of their game to keep customers engaged, informed, and interested.

While modern technological tools such as websites, chatbots, and social media platforms can educate and assist customers quickly, email marketing is still a vital strategy but is often underutilized by companies large and small, says Jeff Pedowitz (www.pedowitzgroup.com), President/CEO of The Pedowitz Group and ForbesBooks author of F The Funnel: A New Way To Engage Customers & Grow Revenue.

“Beefing up your email marketing for the holidays is essential, and it’s an effective way for brands to communicate, especially when customers are being advised to start shopping earlier due to supply-chain problems,” Pedowitz says. “Brands need to get ahead of the curve by reaching out to customers through email and creating added value in their messages.”

Research shows nearly half of marketers rate email marketing as the most effective marketing channel. In another study, 90% of content marketers say email engagement is the top metric they track to measure content performance. Pedowitz gives some tips on email marketing and offers ideas to engage customers.

-Don’t blast one email to your entire database. “This is often called ‘batch and blast,’ “ Pedowitz says. “A series of three emails perform better than a single email. One study showed there were 90% more orders for a welcome series of emails.”

-Know your audience. “Your audience is smart and expects you to send emails that only pertain to them,” Pedowitz says. “If you don’t, studies show the vast majority of consumers will delete the emails, unsubscribe, and become less willing to buy your product or service.” Therefore, Pedowitz says companies must take time to segment their target audience. “Not only will you minimize the negative customer reactions to mistargeted information or promotions,” he says, “but you will be ahead of your competitors.”

-Know how to engage them. Email engagement centers on three fundamentals, Pedowitz says: a strong subject line, simple, to-the-point copy, and graphics if applicable. “Short, concise subject lines will engage the reader,” Pedowitz says. “Create a sense of urgency with your email, without sounding like spam. Measure engagement with email subject line tools from CoSchedule or Email Subject Line Grader.” Pedowitz suggests a summary of the product’s/service’s benefits with bullet points. The majority of the copy should put the reader first. “Leverage pain points or needs of the audience and even their personal motivators right up front,” he says. “Is there a particular problem you can help them with?”

-Offer added value. “Given the supply-chain problems, in lieu of instant gratification that comes with receiving the actual good or service, marketers can interest consumers in becoming part of the future production process,” Pedowitz says. “Invite them as VIPs to help design the next wave of products and services, and let them receive those products and services as future gifts.”

Pedowitz also suggests a virtual immersive experience, which offers customers value in real-time, and monthly promotions in which customers get a discount and an added gift to go with their purchase. “Go above and beyond for prospects,” he says.

“The holiday shopping season is when marketing campaigns kick into high gear,” Pedowitz says. “Emails play a significant role in connecting with your brand audience, telling compelling stories and improving conversions.”

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Jeff Pedowitz (www.pedowitzgroup.com) is ForbesBooks author of F The Funnel: A New Way To Engage Customers & Grow Revenue, and President/CEO of The Pedowitz Group, a consultancy that helps companies create and execute new business models for driving scalable revenue in a digital world. He has over 25 years of experience leading successful B2C and B2B organizations. Pedowitz is widely recognized as an industry expert and thought leader, writing and speaking on a variety of topics related to Revenue Marketing™, demand generation, marketing operations and marketing technology. He hosts a weekly podcast, CMO Insights, interviewing sales and marketing executives on the topics of business transformation, digital transformation and the customer experience.