Customer Incentive Program

To help grow relationships and market share, our client had offered an incentive travel trip to customers that reached purchase goal objectives for more than ten years. Although the incentive travel trip had proven to be very effective to help grow customer relationships and sales growth, only an average of 10% – 15% of their customers generated the purchase volume needed to qualify annually. Our client wanted to engage the balance of customers to help grow overall purchases.

Our recommended solution was to segment customers by purchase volume. Earners for each segment would be required to reach their assigned unique purchase objectives.

High purchase volume customers would continue to be offered the trip, Mid-level purchase volume customers would be offered the trip as a stretch goal, along with a selection of over 30,000 merchandise and individual travel rewards. Lower purchase volume customers would be offered merchandise and individual travel rewards only.

We proposed offering three levels of purchase objectives for each participating customer. Utilizing each customer’s prior year purchase history as a “baseline,” we created each customers’ unique purchase objective(s) and relative reward payout, or the travel program. High volume customers that met their purchase objective for the group incentive trip were required to take the trip to ensure room block commitment was met. For the Mid and Lower customer segments, reward payouts increased commensurate with percentage purchase growth.

Our team built a program website that linked from the clients marketing website. Upon login, each participant could view their unique purchase objectives and payouts. To report weekly purchase progress on each participants homepage, our team accepted weekly purchase updates from the client. This allowed for weekly visibility of their progress toward achieving their purchase objective(s).

To announce the launch of the program, our team prepared and emailed each customer a program invitation. that included their unique purchase objective(s) and reward payout(s). Once sales were updated, participants were emailed a notification of the update. At the end of the program, participants were emailed unique notifications of their level of achievement.

Client realized an immediate cost saving by leveraging the program website to communicate and track purchases for the trip and details to the High-Purchase customers. This was a manual monthly process prior to launching the website.
Program results exceeded all expectations for customers in the Mid and Lower Purchase customer segments. Overall purchases from participating customers grew 26.8% for the first year of the program.