Five Tips to Ensure a Successful Incentive Program

Reposted from Meetings & Incentive Travel - click here for link

As organizations look to reinvest in their incentive travel strategies, the question of how to ensure a program will help achieve the best value for the investment is typically a major topic of discussion. To fuel those discussions, consider how your organization and strategy goes about identifying and understanding the program elements that generate the strongest appeal, interests and participant engagement. In years past, this discussion primarily focused on destination and activities. While these are important components, successful planners will expand their framework, and do so while keeping in mind business objectives and budgets.

Sounds like a big challenge, but it doesn’t have to be. Achieving more effective incentive travel design hinges on addressing five fundamental points in your planning process. While any one item can add tremendous value, look towards incorporating each in concert based upon your organizational and program participants’ unique needs, interests and preferences. Doing so will help make for a much more meaningful, motivational and measurable set of performance outcomes.

The experience - The travel experience must be compelling enough to the individual participant to get them excited to improve their performance efforts. Based on extensive participant research, experience elements that drive the highest levels of excitement include:

• Sun and fun destinations
• Expanded guest policies
• Unscheduled time for leisure activities
• Meaningful reward and recognition activities

Today’s participants are more savvy and particular about the type of experience they have the opportunity to earn. The true measurement of today’s incentive travel program is based upon engagement. Before, during and even after a program, participant engagement is something that has to be earned, retained and nurtured. Focusing on the experience throughout the lifecycle of the program lends the best approach towards more effectively incenting participants and effectively achieving business objectives.

The qualification or rule structure - Above all, the qualification guidelines must be perceived as fair and attainable. For this reason, we recommend companies evaluate their program structures to entertain opportunities of what design enhancements might afford; such as, a more individually based performance structure or going beyond historical glass ceilings where only the top one to three percent of participants qualify as earners. One program design where the same people earn year-after-year can inhibit the meaningful and motivational interests of non-earners.

 

Communications and management buy-in - Client studies continually show that as many as one in four participants in an incentive travel program are unaware they are even eligible or that there is a program present at all. Promotional communications represent a truly performance critical area in establishing and maintaining strong participant engagement throughout the lifecycle of the program. From kick-off announcements, regularly scheduled updates on performance and standings to maintaining continued buzz and excitement, promotional communications can greatly help avoid your program from “being kept a secret” so that you can better ensure broad and steady participant engagement. In addition, encouraging leadership and management to communicate and reinforce program goals by incorporating reminders and updates in formal team meetings and one-on-one engagements helps inform and advise participants on progress and towards ways of stepping up their level of effort.  

 

Measure for effectiveness- Let’s say that an incentive travel program is based upon helping to successfully achieve some prescribed sales target. With that, we believe it is a good idea to leverage sales leaders to model exceptional sales skills by enlisting them in promoting brand values and further equipping participants to become more effective business objective ambassadors. Conducting pre-to-post and additional post-post (30, 60, 90 days after the onsite experience) surveys can provide you further insight and a deeper understanding into the important contribution these people play before, during and well beyond the travel experience. By doing so, you go beyond traditional ROI approaches and gain deeper insights on the intangible values of how your program helped improve the attitudes, behaviors and intentions of program participants.

 

Invite participants into the design process- Design decisions on such program attributes as trip length, location, guest policy, and activities can greatly be informed by surveys, direct inputs from sales advisory councils and past program participants (earners and non-earners). Leveraging these “voice of the participant” insights can really help better align and fine tune your program design to create a much more meaningful, motivational and memorable experience while better supporting core business objectives. Today’s incentive participant places more weight on the type of experience offered before they make engagement choices based upon the added time and effort they need to put forth to earn the reward. Without participant insights, organizations can run great risk with hit and miss outcomes that drive unnecessary costs and simply fall short of providing for a more ideal, overall experience.

 

There are varied types and levels of available practices available to consider in today’s incentive travel strategies. Following these five tips will help design an approach and incentive travel experience that provides for more meaningful and motivational value to program participants. Further aligning to participant interests, needs and preferences creates for more exceptional opportunities to meet, achieve and exceed business performance outcomes that create short and long-term value for both the organization and program participants.

 

 

 

5 Ways to Increase Campaign Response Rates and Avoid Relationship Penalties

Consumers have had enough! A continued exposure to a steadily increasing number of marketing messages, campaigns, advertisements, offers and the like are suffocating relationships. Think about it, messages exist everywhere from traditional magazine, newspaper, television and radio to blogs, emails, web pages and the list goes on and on and on; okay, you get the idea. To quantify this trend, in Accenture’s 2001 Insight Driven Marketing Report, a typical consumer went from an average of 650 messages they were exposed to a day in 1985 to over 3,000 in 2001; share of mind has definitely become a competitive field for businesses.

The unfortunate effects on the attitudes and behaviors of the consumer as a result of undifferentiated, overly abundant and brimful frequency of messages necessitate action by which companies communicate to their existing and future customers. The following five steps will assist in getting a lift out of response rates and increase in overall campaign performance.

1. Integrated Media Channels
Even with the most appealing offer that is strategically appropriate and tailored for specific individuals, response rates are not guaranteed. The main hurdle that remains is that of effectively connecting and communicating with your audience. Determine what channels are most preferred by your targeted audience and create a media plan that integrates direct marketing efforts into a connected stream of touch point activities.

2. Targeted Messaging.
Regardless of the communications channel(s) used, a degree of customization – whether personalization, versioning or targeted offering based upon what is known of the customer – will greatly assist with response rates. At the end of the day, effective campaign performance is about relevance – promoting and communicating directly to me what I may want, when I might need it and from who I might buy it.

3. Don’t Beat Around the Bush, Be a Straight Shooter
Although it’s important to capture the immediate attention of the customer in the headline, do so with brevity and clarity. Another pitfall of campaign efforts is that while a creative message begins with a lead-in, it quickly strays away from what originally captured interest. Often referred to as somewhat of a bait-and-switch, this tactic quickly diminishes the credibility of the promoter in the mind of the consumer. As such, relationships can be damaged and future opportunities can be hindered.

4. Consumers Like it Simple
Hypothetically, if a communications piece went out and it had all of the necessary components such as being targeted, was straight to the point and even involved integrated communications channels, response rates can still be ineffective if the consumer isn’t lent a simplified means to respond. Often enough, campaigns become disenchanting for the consumer due to a clear call to action being missed, an overly complicated process to respond or demands that are too high from a time perspective to complete the transaction.

5. Don’t Over Communicate
Email is one of the largest culprits to consumers being bombarded and overloaded with offers, representing instances where they are receiving hundreds of emails each week. As a result, this channel continues to dwindle in its effectiveness. While new channels have emerged from texting, RSS feeds, PURL’s, Social Media and the like, it’s important to remember that you don’t need to be everywhere, all of the time, hounding (if not annoying) customers and potential customers. Consumers are simply overworked and, for the most part, getting more and more turned-off. Think of your touch point activities as currencies and spend wisely. Awareness isn’t always a good thing, especially if perceptions are not all that flattering.

These guidelines are pertinent to any sector or market situation. Following any number of them provides improved results, but incorporating all of them into communications planning yields a synergistic effect that turbo-charges the effective connectivity with the customer.

The ROI of CRM - Customer Data, Check; Now What?

Okay, so you have the technological foundation laid for CRM, but what’s next? This is a common question corporate executives are left with after spending millions of dollars of development costs associated with the architecture of data bases to bank customer data. No, it’s not as easy as you were probably lead to believe, there’s no green button that puts everything into motion, simply terabytes of data electronically warehoused that are providing no business benefit in their standalone state. So, where do you go from here?

While some organizations have gone with a shoot then aim approach with only results that have shaken the needle, success has been wreaked from those following a disciplined strategy; mining, analyzing and synthesizing the data they hold. Analytics has become the enabling ingredient of CRM solutions. Considering the profile of today’s customer is quite different from just 10 years ago, understanding their differences, likes, dislikes, drivers and other characteristics has become paramount in developing solid business strategies to grow relationships. Why is this important?

-Brand loyalties are weakening and not nearly as strong as they once were

-Consumers are better educated. The advent of the internet provided the perfect outlet for consumers to source from in making their purchase decision(s)

-Promotions have desensitized customers to the point of being numb

-Consumers are more price conscious and demanding value in what they pay, the service they receive and the level of convenience experienced

-Consumers are not as easily put into a segmented class. There are far more segments today than ever

Been caught with your CRM pants down? Still not clear on what all the technology and customer data you’ve successfully centralized provides to your organization? Share your thoughts on how you recommend moving to the next level.