How do you ensure that your incentive fulfillment and fulfillment management processes are simple, easy, affordable, and viable? Learn more in this step-by-step guide.

Define your strategy

Before you can get started with incentive fulfillment and fulfillment management, you'll first need to define your strategy. This will help you understand your targets, what you expect to achieve from your strategy and the milestones that will get you where you need to be. 

When you define your strategy this way, you will start to understand the parameters you are working with. This is vital as you keep incentivization affordable and effective. You will understand your key objectives, and you will know how much you will spend in order to reach those points.

There are several different strategies you can choose from:

Direct sale of incentives

You may achieve direct revenue growth from gift cards sales. While this is not a traditional incentive program — as the gift cards are not being used as incentives but becoming products themselves — it is still a useful way to boost your revenue.

Some businesses will sell their gift cards, redeemable against their products and services, in their eStore. Other businesses may offer gift cards from other organizations, leveraging the power of big-brand names.

Reward scheme incentives

Reward schemes are a popular way of locking in customer engagement. Customers complete certain actions — generally, purchasing — and receive rewards. Employee reward schemes may involve completing other actions to gain points. Once they have built up enough, they may be able to access an incentive, such as a gift card.

You can set the rewards thresholds however you want. It will be helpful to research suitable rewards for each threshold. For instance, you need to set your thresholds to an attainable level so that participants feel they can reach them. However, you should not set them too low, or you may end up giving away too many incentives for little to no benefit to your business.

Specific action incentives

Many businesses offer incentives for specific actions. This differs from a reward program in that the participant is not working toward a gift card incentive but instead receives one immediately. For example, you may offer a gift card as a reward for completing a customer feedback survey. You are exchanging the data for the monetary value of the gift card.

Again, this will require careful balance. You need to ensure that the data you receive is worth the value of the incentives you offer.

Customer relationship management incentives

Losing a customer can be a serious issue for your business. You are losing out on direct revenue from your customer base and risking a damaged word-of-mouth reputation. This second issue can have a huge knock-on effect that can harm your business.

If a customer has a bad experience with your business, you may offer a gift card incentive to smooth over the relationship. This can turn a negative experience into a positive one.

Lead generation incentives

Offering gift cards and other incentives to leads can help nurture these prospects toward conversion. Once they have converted, they may provide you with long-term value as they return to make repeat purchases.

You'll need to analyze how much each connection and conversion will be worth for your business. This will help you decide how much to spend on incentives.

Other incentive fulfillment programs

These are just a few examples of what is possible from your incentive fulfillment strategy.

Other examples include offering prizes for customer competition winners or awards for employee of the year programs. All of these examples are unified by two things — affordability and viability.

You need to afford the value of the gift cards you are delivering. And you need to make sure that the value you receive from this is worth it in the long term. For example, direct selling gift cards may seem more affordable than offering gift cards for free during lead acquisition — but the latter strategy may prove to be more effective if you land high-value customers.

Choose your gift card fulfillment model

There are several models you can choose for incentive fulfillment. While the choice will be personal, it should be guided by your strategy and volume requirements. Take a look at some potential options — choosing the right one for your business will help you make your strategy easy, affordable, and effective.

Bulk incentive fulfillment

Gift cards can be delivered as part of a bulk fulfillment process. This involves sending a larger amount of gift cards to a single entity, ready for redistribution. This may be suitable for businesses dealing with very high levels of fulfillment volume or for companies working in the B2B market.

Personalized incentive fulfillment

This represents the most customer-focused fulfillment model. With this type of incentive fulfillment, each gift card is delivered to an individual customer or user and is customized with a tailored message. Unless you work with automated technology to simplify this process, you may find personalized incentive fulfillment difficult to achieve at higher volumes.

API incentive fulfillment

API incentive fulfillment utilizes an API connection to deliver digital gift cards exactly where they need to be. This may involve transferring gift cards to a customer's digital wallet or simply integrating the gift card with your platform. API technology can make it easy to manage incentives over higher volumes.

Marketplace fulfillment

Marketplace fulfillment enables rewards program participants to access the equivalent of an eStore for gift cards. From here, they can use their points or other currency to purchase gift cards directly. This works as a self-service fulfillment model, allowing subscribers to connect with rewards they value.

Integrate with existing solutions

Effective fulfillment management requires the right tools and solutions. These are the digital features you will use to distribute and keep track of the gift cards you are working with. Your strategy will need the following:

• An API to facilitate connections between the payout option and your platform
• A backend that enables data management, analysis, and insight
• Professional reporting tools so you know what you are working with
• Customization tools to personalize and tailor the delivery experience

The above will be critical as you target success in incentive fulfillment. The listed tools will give you a good foundation to build and provide an excellent starting point as you deliver incentives, draw information and insight from fulfillment, and manage customer interactions.

However, you are probably going to want more than this. You'll also need to ensure your fulfillment management solution integrates with your existing software, creating a seamless environment to look after your customers, employees, and other stakeholders. These integrations include:

• Integration directly with brands to enable direct sales to customers
• Integration with existing analytics software to draw enhanced value from data
• Integration with customer relationship management software to support higher levels of engagement
• Integration with enterprise resource planning platforms to assess the cost and efficacy of the ongoing campaign
• Integration with customer and employee rewards management software
• Integration with content management platforms and development platforms to merge incentive solutions into websites and apps

While not all of these integrations are necessary for your business and strategy, they indicate how a fulfillment management program fits your setup. It must become a seamless part, directly connecting with other solutions.

The Runa platform uses secure APIs to achieve these seamless connections. It becomes highly effective without compromising data security and privacy.

Work with an industry-leading payout infrastructure

One of the best ways to ensure your incentive fulfillment strategy remains effective, manageable, and affordable is to work with an industry-leading payout infrastructure. This means choosing a platform that can offer an enormous range of gift cards and other types of payouts, supporting purchases from various sectors and even different global locations.

Runa fits this description perfectly. We can ensure your participants always find exciting and energizing incentives, bringing together 1,300 brands from 30 countries worldwide and supporting 18 currencies and 16 languages.

The Runa platform also offers various features that make incentive management easy, in addition to seamless integrations with other software platforms. To find out more about what we can do, reach out to our team — or take a tour of the platform via our demo.