GiftCard Partners Blog

Whether it’s an academic study or a commercial focus group, it's critical to recruit and maintain the right audience to ensure statistical significance to support a hypothesis or represent a buying group. The most straightforward way to recruit and maintain that audience is through incentives.  

While motivating your sales team can be a difficult task, it’s a crucial factor in the overall success of your organization. Highly motivated sales professionals are more engaged with their work and have lower levels of absenteeism. They also help your business thrive by both acquiring and maintaining loyal and recurrent clients or customers.

On October 29^th GiftCard Partners Co-CEO Deborah Merkin joined Vicki Ravenel, VP of Business Development at Ultimate Choice and Bill Bradley, VP of Marketing and Business Development at Omega Management Group to discuss the impact employee recognition has on your consumer experience. The webcast, Employee Recognition Programs that Enrich the Customer Experience, talked to the importance of consistency, reward type and management support in building successful employee recognition. In addition, it reviewed:

The IMA Summit is less than a week away!  The 2014 Incentive Marketing Association Summit is in its 15th year and the GiftCard Partners team is gearing up to take the trip to Philadelphia.

It's the ultimate question that marketers would love to have the answer to, how can retailers deliver winning strategies for their own loyalty programs?  Loyalty drives sales, today, tomorrow and in the future, but how does a retailer keep loyalty fresh? Currently, U.S. households participate in over 20 loyalty programs, but less than 10% are actively using their accounts. Retailers need to produce winning strategies to have a successful loyalty program.  Based on the existing loyal customer base, 37% of retailers believe that customer retention will be the #1 contributor to growth in the next 3 years.  This customer retention correlates to same-store sales. 73% of smartphone users would like to connect their loyalty programs directly to their mobile devices. Recognition and rewards need to be differentiated. There is no one size fits all with rewards. In fact, lack of differentiation hinders program adoption. 69% of loyalty program members want to receive personalized discounts. Tracking technology allows retailers to gather shopper purchase history, spend, and browsing behaviors, allowing for retailers to offer personalized discounts. Lastly, well-planned implementation for loyalty programs is critical; the first 6 months of the launch being the most critical time for a loyalty program.  Almost 30% of retailers rank store loyalty as a top 5 technology-related challenge in their industry.
Read the infographic “How Sweet It Is: The Satisfaction of a Successful Loyalty Program” here!