Gartner has been reiterating and emphasizing the importance of engagement in your marketing programs as an integral part of creating a delightful customer experience.
I mean, it makes sense, right?
You want buyers and customers to actually engage with your marketing efforts. It shows that your messaging is working, you’ve captured the attention of a potential customer, and can better understand where they are in their customer journey.
Gartner advises that you should include helpful, personalized information to provide positive customer experience and build customer loyalty when you’re thinking about how exactly to increase the engagement rates you’re seeing with your marketing campaigns.
Enter Alyce Activate, your marketing campaign’s best friend.
Alyce Activate helps take those otherwise one-to-many interactions and turn them into unique moments for your prospects, customers and partners in a personal yet scalable way.
But when exactly should you offer up a gift in your marketing programs? How do you word the offer so it doesn’t sound like a bribe, but instead an incentive to perform an action the prospect would’ve performed anyway?
All of your questions will be answered here!
A Quick Reminder of How Activate Works
You set up your Alyce Activate campaigns like you would a Personal Gifting campaign; choosing the campaign budget, the gift message, the gift to send and the types of gifts available to redeem in the Alyce marketplace.
Keep in mind since you will be sending the same gift and the same gift message to multiple people, you’ll want the language and options chosen to reflect that.
The last step to getting your Activate campaign live is uploading the recipients you want to make eligible to access this gift. Whether you upload a static list, or integrate it with Marketo Smart Campaigns, at the click of a button you are able to generate a universal gift link that can be shared with all of those recipients through any of your marketing channels.
When And How To Use Alyce Activate
Get Contracts Through Legal Review Faster
We all know the feeling of refreshing your phone over and over again to see if the final paperwork for a big deal was finally signed. It feels like you can only sit and wait for the company on the other side to cross the t’s and dot the i’s. But there’s a secret weapon you can pull out of your pocket: A gift.
If there are open opportunities who have been sitting under the “legal/procurement” stage for a while and you want to help your sales counterparts close their deals faster, try incorporating Alyce Activate.
Choose the deals that are stalled out and give your champion a little nudge. This will not only show them just how much you value their partnership and what the relationship between your two companies will look like moving forward, but it will help you drive urgency on the inside – where it feels like things are sometimes out of your hands.
Incentivize Virtual Event Attendance
The average no-show percentage of virtual events can go up to 35%, so to keep and hold the attention of your virtual event registrants before the event, give them a reason to show up with a gift!
Using Alyce Activate, you can choose a segment or all of your virtual event attendees to send a gift to if they attend your event.
Most virtual event platforms can give you a list of who attended or just registered for your event after it occurs so you can make sure to follow up accordingly.
According to Bizzabo, 52% of event marketers believe it is more difficult to create unique and memorable experiences for attendees through virtual events in comparison to in-person event.
A great way to create these experiences is to take otherwise mundane experiences and add in moments of delight.
Incentivize Virtual Event Registration
Virtual events are on the rise. According to IMPACT, by 2021, video (including web conferencing) is projected to account for 80% of all internet traffic. So we’re all fighting for ways to make sure that our virtual events stand out against the pack.
Offering up a gift to the first 100, 300, 500 registrants of your event can help drive initial momentum for your event.
To keep your offer exclusive, you can offer up a gift to just customers, just ABM accounts, or another specific segment of your database to keep your offer feeling personal to the person on the other side of the offer. On the other hand, you could also build momentum on top of your event and open up the offer to anyone. This builds your marketable database full of potential customers who are willing to interact with your marketing offers and starts to get prospective buyers to feel attached to your brand.
Increase Content Consumption
Content is a huge part of any buyer’s journey. On average, companies say that their buyers need to consume on average 18 pieces of content from the company before becoming a customer.
That feels like a lot of content, but it places a huge amount of value on each of the pieces to make sure that the value promised in the deliverable is there.
Not to mention, B2B companies are working with a “consumption gap” with their content, meaning that it takes longer for prospects to actually consume the content they download the higher up in the company you go.
That means that pushing more content to a potential buyer before they’ve had the time to consume the first piece of content could be detrimental to that person’s customer journey.
To create urgency around consuming the content once your prospects have downloaded it, why not offer them a gift? With Alyce Activate and a Post-Gift CTA, you can create a delightful and seamless experience consuming your content while keeping the attention of your target buyers for longer.
Customer Referral Programs
Referral programs are a great way to have your power users drive new business with users who will be just as passionate about using your product.
Sometimes these programs are great in theory, but it can be hard to drive enough referrals for the program to be worth it.
Well, try incorporating Activate into your programs.
By offering your customers a gift if they refer a friend to your product, you can drive more referrals from that customer as well as drive more motivation from the other members of your referral program who want to receive the same caliber gift.
Here’s an example of an email you could send to the members of your referral program once they hit your specified referral program milestones.
If you can dream it, you can do it with Activate. This is the perfect time to spice up any lead engagement campaign that you’re running and entice prospects in any part of your funnel with a personal gift.
Learn more about Alyce Activate and automated business gifts.
