When it comes to advertising and marketing, there are so many products and services out there nowadays that it can be hard to fully understand what they do. As Odenza has specialized in the incentive travel market for 20 years, we know that explaining what our packages do is fundamental to clients knowing how they should use them and why they’re so valuable.
In this article, I want to provide you with an overview of what incentive packages are, how they can be used, and provide you with a couple of success stories along the way.
What are Incentive Packages?
As the name suggests, an incentive package – particularly travel incentives, in our case – is a product you can utilize to incentivize prospective customers toward a sale, inspire customer loyalty, and to motivate your team to strive for better results.
Say, for example, you run an auto dealership. You want to up your sales for the month, but you know that more run-of-the-mill offers such as cashback or free fuel for a year don’t bring in as much business as you’d like – and that’s because your local competitors are doing the exact same thing. If you were to throw in a unique incentive such as a 2-night trip to Vegas for two or a 7-day cruise with a vehicle purchase, this can command more people’s attention.
This is the basic premise of travel incentives and, by extension, incentive packages. They’re a value-added perk for those customers who buy something from you. If you’re looking to motivate your sales team to reach higher benchmarks, then you could use a trip to Vegas as the incentive for the highest achieving team member.
How You Should Use Them
To give you an idea of how these types of incentives should be used, it’s worth talking about one of our myriad success stories: Sutherlin Nissan in Florida, which is headed by GM Lance Lopez. They have been using our travel incentives for years, and this is thanks to the notable success they have had with them. Along with a random prize wheel that allows customers to win a cruise, the same cruise incentive has been used as an effective closing tool.
When one of Sutherlin Nissan’s customers is not 100% sure about buying a vehicle, Lance Lopez notes, “We’ll say, ‘What if we throw in a cruise for two?’ 90 per cent of the time, they say yes.” Hitting such a high closing rate is significant, and a fundamental aspect of this success depends on how you sell these incentives to your customers. So a lazy, half-hearted approach is obviously going to fail. If you don’t care about the incentive, why would your customers?
Be sure to keep these other tips in mind:
Promote your incentive across the board: Whatever marketing or ad channels you make use of on a regular basis, ensure you’re promoting your latest incentive on those channels.
Use collateral in-store: if your business has a brick-and-mortar location, make sure marketing collateral about the incentive is there – table talkers, posters, balloons; Odenza can provide this collateral for you. If your business is purely operated online, then make sure you have banners, CTAs, and other digital collateral/graphics that promote the incentive
Social media: don’t be afraid to regularly remind your customers about your latest incentive promotions across all social platforms you use – and remember that they are powerful marketing channels nowadays
Train staff: Make sure your team is well-versed on the ins and outs of the incentives you’re offering so that they can confidently and enthusiastically explain to customers what the exact perks and parameters of the incentives are.
Is There a Magical Formula to Success?
No, of course not. The best approach will always depend on your business, where you’re located, how many local competitors you have, who your target market is, and much more. But one constant is those tips I mentioned above. If you fail to embrace any of them, it can have a notable impact on the ultimate ROI you get. While it may come off as a cliché, being 100% behind any incentive promotion is the best way of moving toward success.
For example, another Nissan dealership we worked with in Toronto (PDF download), Ontario, hit numbers that were 176% over their sales targets. And part of the reason why this happened is because they had something unique to offer (the incentive itself – a trip for two to Las Vegas), marketing collateral about the incentive was everywhere throughout the dealership, and every salesperson enthusiastically brought the offer to customers’ attention. It was such a success that they extended the promotion for another month and a half. And, similarly to Sutherlin Nissan in Florida, they found the incentives to be a fantastic closing tool for sales.
So while you may need to take time to consider the best approach for your business, whether you run an auto dealership or have your own jewelry store, ensuring this promotion is kept front-of-mind for customers and your staff is one guaranteed, integral constant.
If you want to utilize an incentive to inspire your own staff or sales team (e.g. you’ll be giving a trip or cruise away as a reward), then chances are that value proposition is going to be easier to sell to them. A travel incentive has a longer-lasting, positive effect on morale and productivity. It is certainly going to command more attention and happiness than a small cash bonus, which has a comparatively limited sense of worth – once it’s spent its perceived value vanishes. But with a trip, your staff has the excitement of the trip’s impending occurrence, the joy of the trip itself, the memories and photos and stories to share after the fact… There is a profound longevity to the reward and the experience it offers.
Getting Started
No matter what your business specializes in or whether you want to incentivize customers or motivate your team, travel incentives and other incentive packages are great solutions. To find out more, fill out the form below, contact us online, or call us on 1-866-883-2968.
