How Incentive Marketing Helps Boost Sales

When it comes to running a business, you are either selling a product or a service. From a business perspective, no matter what others tell you, the number one thing that will keep your organization actively operational is revenue, i.e., the amount that you will generate from making sales of your products or services in the market to your customers and clients. Revenue is the lifeblood of any business, and we all know that without making sales, no business can survive. But there is one thing that is often coupled with sales, and that is marketing.

There are different types of marketing channels, strategies, and tactics that marketers use across different industries and businesses, irrespective of their size and nature. Today, we are going to discuss one of the most common yet effective marketing strategies, called incentive marketing, that helps businesses boost sales.

Incentive marketing for sales is defined as the concept of providing customers, partners, and employees with rewards, gifts, and discounts and incentivizing them in exchange for their specific behaviors or actions that benefit the business. It could be anything from making a purchase, referring others, or just collaborating with the brand to increase engagement. 

An incentive program works like a motivation to certain people like the customers, suppliers, or even the company's salesforce. There are many different types of examples present in modern marketing where big brands use incentive marketing as a powerful tool to enhance brand awareness and loyalty, boost sales, and increase customer retention. For example, a food delivery app offers a cash bonus if you refer your friend to download the app and sign up on the platform. Another example can be a company offering an international trip to the sales executive who makes the highest sales of the month. Based on these examples, you can categorize incentive marketing for sales into two main types. Let us check them out. 

• Customer incentive programs: The incentive program is designed for customers, suppliers, and vendors to encourage them to make a purchase, refer to other individuals or organizations, or engage with the brand.
• Employee incentive programs: It is designed for employees only in order to motivate them to improve their performance and meet business goals and sales targets.

All these sales promotion strategies are simple examples of incentive marketing. These may involve using coupons, loyalty programs, giveaways, early access, free samples, activity rewards bonuses, and referral programs. They can also include buy-one-get-one offers, gift cards, etc. Now that we briefly understand what incentive marketing really is, let us discuss some of its key benefits.

Below is the list of main benefits that companies may get by engaging in incentive marketing: 

• Boosting Sales and Revenue: As clear from the title of this article, incentive marketing helps in enhancing product or service sales or subscriptions, directly adding to the revenue. By offering an incentive on purchases, businesses can increase both the volume of sales and frequency.
• Better Customer Retention: Incentives can help develop an emotional bond with the brand and encourage a consumer to come back for more. This directly builds customer loyalty, and the business is able to retain customers, which is a huge thing in a competitive market.
• Increase Brand Awareness: When buyers engage with customer rewards programs, the brand becomes visible to other people, which increases brand awareness. Thus, incentive marketing helps brands in expanding their reach via indirect promotion.
• Encourages Customer Actions: Incentive marketing for sales is tailored to meet customer behaviors, and the strategy is designed in such a way that it aligns with customers' desires. Companies can design incentives to make customers leave reviews, share products with friends, or engage in other actions that increase the brand's visibility and credibility.
• Motivate Employees And Partners: The employee incentive programs are also designed to make employees work more and try to maximize sales because they receive incentives for it. This is a very common practice in companies that are highly dependent on sales. Employees and teams generally receive monetary incentives upon completing their sales target.

Incentive marketing is a common, old, and, most importantly, tried and tested method of boosting revenue with incentives. When we look at it from a different angle, we can see that a good incentive strategy turns customers into a tool and a catalyst, enabling them to work for the brands, indirectly boosting their sales in exchange for rewards, gifts, coupons, bonuses, discounts, and so on. This directly shows how customer influence is also incredibly valuable in the whole sales process and in generating revenue.

People trust their friends, family, relatives and colleagues more than a TV advertisement, billboard, or email. So, it is more likely that they will take their advice when buying a product or service. This is why referrals play a key role in the process of sales and revenue generation.

As noted above, a major part of incentive marketing for sales relies on good customer referrals. Here are some tactics that you can use to generate effective customer referrals: 

• Offer Appealing Rewards: Businesses should not start a referral program just for the sake of it. They should provide it as an attraction point to the customers. In other words, it should be something that makes them want to give referrals and engage with the brand.
• Simplified Process: Today, people prefer convenience, and anything that complicates a straightforward thing really makes them lose interest. So, try and keep the referral process simple, easy to share, and effective so that it can be completed in a maximum of 4 to 5 steps.
• Creating A Sense Of Urgency: This tip is linked to the attention span of customers. Any referral should require an urgent action implementation. If the customer postpones or ignores it, it is highly unlikely for them to come back and complete the process.
• Track And Acknowledge Referrals: Remember, this is not a one-time thing. Boosting sales requires businesses to work on referrals constantly. Also, it is always better to track records related to referrals properly and acknowledge the efforts of the customers publicly to keep them motivated.

Having discussed all the key points, we can confidently say that incentive marketing is one of the best ways to boost sales and generate revenue both internally with employees and externally with customers. You just need to find the right incentive that aligns with your target audience and workforce.