Incentives can go a long way to cement relationships, initiating an engagement in your product or brand in the form of a reward for behaviour. This mechanism or exchange provides the beneficiary with the feel good value factor, often resulting in higher sales and repeat behaviour, or a cycle of continued loyalty to the brand.

What’s In It For Me?

Put simply, it’s commonly known as WIFM (What’s in It For Me) like a bargaining or negotiating tactic. If I do this for you, what’s in it for me? It’s written in our DNA going back to childhood when a parent might use a reward for demonstrating good behaviour or achieving a goal.

Grow Relationships With Data Collection

It would be short sighted to simply hand over an instant reward for purchase without further engaging with the buyer who made the purchase. So in order to start a dialogue and grow relationships, you need to ensure some data is collected from the start.

As with loyalty, when a mutually beneficial exchange happens, most people don’t mind providing their information so you can keep in touch to ensure the relationship prospers. You get more sales and they get more rewards. This is a key ingredient in any form of reward because without it you can’t provide full recognition and continue to communicate about your product developments, including special offers.

Influencing The Sale

Inspire Loyalty provide reward and recognition programmes for hospitality in the form of guest loyalty. Members experience the product and return for more, or they are enticed to visit a hotel or restaurant for the first time, to a venue they might not have considered before loyalty was introduced. This is quite different from an incentive programme, where the buyer is the influencer and not the person who experiences the product, which is certainly the case for bookers.

Bookers are intrinsically attracted to incentives, and it’s a competitive audience to capture due to various incentives offered in the marketplace.  Some companies solely rely on the strength of their brand and product to sell their proposition, but rightly or wrongly the incentive is the motivator, the WIFM, which often acts as the tipping point to influence the purchase.

Yes, the booker firstly has to have confidence in the product, service and experience which they are recommending, since after all that’s what their objective is when representing the buyer, but when a gift or reward is thrown in for good measure, it can often seal the deal.

Recognition

We would love to rest on the laurel that saying thank you goes a long way, but from our experience, to influence sales you need to go an extra step and provide some form of physical gratitude too. It’s a great reminder of your brand, that if the booker receives a gift they’ll have the opportunity to enjoy their own memorable experience from something you’ve given them, and that could be a bottle of wine, a retail gift code such as John Lewis, Waitrose, Amazon or Love2Shop (or any relevant partner in their geographical area) or a contribution towards experiencing your own product, dependent on the cost of sale. Whatever the choice of reward, it needs to be meaningful and worthwhile in recognition of the achievement by the booker – giving you business.

Lifetime Value

Don’t just look at the cost, consider the return on investment. A higher redemption rate means higher engagement, which is 93% for one of our clients!  If you allocate a budget of 5% or 10% of a sale towards the reward, it doesn’t take great maths to work out you’ll keep 95% or 90% of the booking value, with a high chance you’ll continue to get more business from the same booker over the long term, otherwise known as customer lifetime value. So it’s easy to measure success and remember you only pay out when the business comes in.

Build Your Loyalty Programme With Us

Inspire Loyalty equip bookers and influencers near and far with branded incentive programmes, translated to the native tongue including Oceania Cruises UK, Germany, Australia and New Zealand; Swiss International Hotels and Resorts EMEA and Silversea.

Stand out from the crowd and incentivise your business today.