What is a Gift Reward Strategy?
Gift Reward Strategy is a marketing approach used to increase sales opportunities for businesses engaging prospective buyers online. It’s a component of the growth engineering discipline led by Newton Day.
With Gift Reward Strategy, businesses can offer instant start value to prospective customers and overcome the barrier to effective online prospect engagement.
The strategy offers a gift to prospective customers, prompting further engagement with the business, and then offers a reward to transition the buyer to a solution selection state. Growth consultants can design an escalating value regime over a series of touch-point events to increase the likelihood of its success.
Adopting a Gift Reward Strategy increases call to action (CTA) conversion rates, thereby boosting sales opportunities.
What type of business is Gift Reward Strategy for?
Any business that engages companies online can benefit from tuning its Gift Reward Strategy. This approach is particularly useful for businesses that find it challenging to bring their customer value to site visitors early in the buying cycle. It mostly benefits businesses that have traditionally struggled to present their value to customers online, such as firms offering professional services and those that must speak to a potential customer before offering a proposal.
The challenge of ‘instant start value’
Like it or not, yours is a digital business. No matter the type of business you’re in, over 80% of the buying cycle occurs online. For every modern commercial enterprise, there’s a critical need to bring value to prospective customers earlier in the buying cycle. Inevitably, suppliers must engage with prospective buyers online; and before they can identify the individual or company entity in question.
The current state of digital competition means that businesses with the means to present their customer value instantly have a marked commercial advantage over those who don’t.
Buyers are looking for instant start value; i.e. to experience the value of an offer instantly. There are three essential challenges every business of this kind will have:
1. knowing who the customer is and what it is they want
2. bringing enough value to them early enough
3. having a time or event sensitive.
Can you live with the failing ‘state of the art’?
The present aim of state of the art digital marketing is to get people to share their contact details by responding to CTAs, in order to invoke a conversation that could lead to a sale.
Nevertheless, this approach generally has less than 3% conversion rate.
This means, for every 100 people that invest time to tend your digital engagement efforts, fewer than 3 will ever become a sales opportunity.
How it works
A Gift Reward Strategy comprises of two key strategic elements:
The 'Gift'
Strategies aim to ‘gift’ some aspect of a business’s customer value to communities of prospective buyers during the early stages of the buying cycle.
The purpose of this strategic element is to motivate prospective customers to consider committing themselves to an engagement.
The 'Reward'
The obvious question to answer is—‘How can I reward customers to engage with my company once I have offered a small gift that exposes an aspect of my value?’
Through the provision of the Reward, the supplier aims to transition the buyer from a problem or solution-aware state to a solution-selection state.
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Reward agendas often rely on trust and authority that comes from imparting knowledge and being easy to do business with to persuade prospective customers to buy from them instead of an alternative source.
Accelerating Gift Reward Strategies
For growth consultants, the ideal (optimal) scenario is to increase the likelihood of success resulting from a Growth Reward Strategy by designing a escalating value regime over a series of touchpoint events.
This approach requires a deep appreciation of:
#1. The target audience persona
#2. The customer value of the provider
#3. Available technology-led engagement methods and solutions
How Gift Reward Strategies shape campaign styles
You can build your outreach approach around an effective Gift Reward Strategy to create a reliable sales lead engine.
Marketing experiments need to be controlled
Marketing is a series of experiments. When an enterprise starts out on its growth journey, executives have no idea which of those experiments will work. It becomes necessary to try out the various routes to creating sales conversations, beginning with those most likely to succeed.
Most importantly, you need to control your marketing experiments by installing measuring tools and methods. Generally, companies]forage for leads by adopting gut feel and instinct to drive decisioning or electing to throw marketing budget and sheer weight of messaging volumes at the problem to gain sufficient volumes of opportunities to feed.
Without measurement, marketing results are hit and miss
Marketing executives tend to try out many different agencies and methods to create leads, always hoping one of these tests will create a result. This all happens generally without any clear plan, tactic, or strategy.
Therefore, even when an initiative succeeds, it’s not obvious whether results are by happenstance, or if it is indeed a reliable and robust solution to generate sales leads.
To maximise Gift Reward Strategy, businesses need to understand their customer value
A Gift Reward Strategy focuses on presenting some aspect of customer value in the form of a gift. Therefore, before building out a strategy, planners need to know what value they bring to customers.
From Guesswork to Craftwork
A Gift Reward Strategy pivots the focus of marketing plans away from crude and ineffective sales lead generation ambitions toward more effective customer value delivery interventions.
Understanding your customer value
Fundamental to getting your Gift Reward Strategy right is the need to know what your buying audience likes and thinks (i.e., what value they see from what you produce and how you produce it).
It’s important to grasp what things your customers value that you are uniquely able to deliver over close competitive rivals.
Identifying what lies at the heart of your enterprise that creates value for customers is an essential step on this journey.