5 Golden Rules For Creating Rewards Your Customers Will Love

So, you’re thinking about offering rewards for your customers?

Perhaps you’ve read our report that shows how rewards help you increase sales and grow your brand sustainably by creating an emotional connection. Or maybe you’ve come to that conclusion by yourself! Either way, we’re here to demonstrate how to break free from the discount spiral and discover new sales promotion ideas that put your customer first.

That’s why we’re sharing our five golden rules for creating rewards your customers love.

1. Rewards should complement your product or service

We’ve all seen sales promotions where the reward for purchasing is totally unrelated to the product. No matter how valuable the reward is, this sort of promotion just doesn’t sit right. When customers are shopping for a product, they’re in a specific mindset – they’re thinking about how that product can improve their life. Adding unrelated factors to their decision-making process does little other than confuse and even put them off.

Instead, think about how you can play into that process. Rewards can be a great tool for giving customers a taste of the life your product offers. For example, the cool travel footage they’ll capture with a GoPro, or the smiles of loved ones receiving gifts around a Christmas tree. Rewards transform a transaction into the promise of a certain lifestyle – which has infinitely more value in consumers’ eyes.

If you’re familiar with Maslow’s Hierarchy, you’ll know humans have five basic needs. As we move up the pyramid, we become motivated by the next level of need. Think about it this way: what need does your product fulfil? More interestingly, what’s the ‘upgrade’, or next level in the pyramid? How can you package your product with a reward that demonstrates its potential?

2. Rewards should fulfil the needs and desires of customers

3. Rewards should help communicate your marketing message

Think of rewards as an extension of your creative marketing campaign. What are your key marketing messages for this product? What do you stand for as a brand?

Perhaps you want to demonstrate the benefits of a new feature that makes your product stand out from the competition. Or maybe you want to communicate your new sustainability strategy. You could even use the opportunity to position your brand alongside an event or trend that aligns with your values, capturing the attention of a new audience thanks to the halo effect.

Whatever your marketing message, you can customize a reward that serves it. That’s just one of the reasons why rewards are a more sustainable way to grow your brand than homogenous discounts that do nothing to create an emotional connection.

4. Rewards should help you achieve your marketing objectives

Unlike discounts, there’s almost no limit to what reward-based sales promotions can help you achieve. Yes, creative rewards can increase sales and market share quickly. But they can also increase brand loyalty and engagement, encourage upselling and bulk-buying, or even lead to increased POS display space – to name just a few.

At RIX, we work with you to understand your marketing objectives, then create three tailored, consumer-centric sales promotion ideas that will help you achieve them. That way, you benefit from our experience and expertise in running rewards-based sales promotions, while retaining full ownership and transparency of your marketing strategy.

5. Rewards should be achievable within your budget

Reward-based sales promotions aren’t as expensive as you think. For the same cost as a discount promotion – which is often up to 50% of the market value of your stock – there are countless options for creative rewards that work much harder for your brand. You just need a bit of courage and imagination to adopt a new approach.

Here at RIX, we work within your current budget to create rewards that fulfil our five golden rules and increase your ROI. Because we bring a fresh perspective of your product and brand, we can introduce concepts you might not usually consider. Plus, our global client base gives us unique insight into what works for different target audiences across the world.

So, have you decided what reward you want to offer? Here’s what you need to know about running a successful reward-based sales promotion – from how to write your terms and conditions, to making sure you’ve got the resources for fulfilment.

Want someone to do all this for you? Get in touch to find out how we can help.

Find out how we can help you create sales promotions your customers will love.