How Your Comms Campaign is Critical to Driving Incentive ROI

Communications campaigns play a crucial role in driving ROI for incentive programmes. Without communicating the objectives, the reward and participant’s progress towards their goal, you cannot hope to achieve effective results from your audience. Sandra Collins, Communication Director of The UK Collective by BCD M&E writes from her expert insight.The purpose of any incentive is to encourage desired behaviours. Whether that is increasing sales and profit margins, reducing debt, boosting morale, or improving customer satisfaction. The goals and how to achieve them, must be clearly communicated to have an impact on performance.

However, whatever the objective, when planning your incentive communication campaign there are some key factors to consider which will ensure your efforts have the desired effect.

Maximising ROI for Your Incentives

Your communications campaign needs to be creative, well planned and properly executed to contribute to maximising your incentive ROI. Here’s what you need to include:

Clearly defined objectives

A well-designed communications campaign must clearly articulate your incentive programme’s objectives. By ensuring participants understand the purpose of the programme and the goals being set, your campaign can help keep their efforts on track, which will lead to greater results.

Build Awareness

Effective campaigns build awareness with the target audience. Communications should be layered through various channels such as emails, intranet, bespoke internet sites, App platforms and social media, if appropriate. Your campaign can reach participants across different touchpoints to ensure they are informed and educated about the incentive.

Driving Engagement

Engaging communications can motivate and inspire participants to connect with the incentive and ultimately achieve your objectives. Personalised messages, performance updates, teasers about the reward or travel destination create excitement and a sense of urgency, encouraging participants to stay motivated and push to reach the rewards.

Focus on the Prize

Clearly communicating the incentive reward and “dangling the carrot” is essential for driving participation and motivation. The campaign should showcase how aspirational a travel incentive destination is and the “money can’t buy” aspects of the programme.

Knowledge is Power

A well-executed campaign can provide participants with the necessary support and resources to succeed. An easy to access platform or hub should contain all the essential information they need along with tools and support to help them compete and achieve. This could include training materials, performance tips, access to relevant tools or technology as well as guidance on how to track their progress.

Recognising Excellence

Communication channels can be used to facilitate ongoing recognition as a way of reinforcing positive behaviour and driving continuous improvement. Two-way communication is always more engaging, so aim to provide opportunities for participants to share feedback and celebrate achievements. By publicly recognising top performers you can enhance engagement and encourage ongoing participation.

Be Data Driven

Finally, robust campaign metrics enables you to track the performance of the incentive programme and make informed decisions to maximise ROI. By monitoring open rates, testing different formats, delivery times and channels you can align your comms to make them more impactful and effective. Crunching the participation data can identify areas for improvement and allow you to refine your communication strategy to deliver even better results.

In summary, a well-planned and executed communications campaign is critical in driving ROI for any incentive by effectively engaging participants, setting objectives, promoting participation, and sharing ongoing feedback.