The start of any relationship is special, and the one between brand and customer is no different.
Like most relationships, brands and customers have a "honeymoon phase" - a period of time (up to 90 days in discretionary retail) from when a customer first decided to become "known" by the brand, when they're in love with a product or service or perhaps more accurately, they’re ready to be. This makes it a make-or-break period for cultivating positive customer experiences.
These initial stages of the customer journey represent a one-off opportunity to establish trust and deliver value - Onboarding Incentives, by extension, serve as an introduction to the brand, its program and what behaviours are considered valuable for an ongoing and mutually beneficial relationship. This guide aims to help businesses establish Onboarding Incentives. If you’re interested in how to keep the customer at the centre of the general onboarding process, you can read about that here.
Over the past five years, the cost of acquiring new customers has risen by almost half. It's crucial that the money you spend to acquire new customers is strategic, and purposeful and can be pulled quickly from channels that aren't delivering results. When it does work, you’ve got to stick the landing with Onboarding.
It’s also important to note here, that heavy investment customer acquisition can put excess strain on the later stages of the lifecycle attempting to recover sunk costs. Getting new customers is essential, but an exclusive focus on acquisition will end up hurting profits from other phases of the lifecycle if neglected.
When it comes to onboarding incentives, two fundamental desires lie at the heart of this "honeymoon" period: Possibility and Novelty. An immediate reward for joining a brand hits the novelty trigger while the overarching program structure and how quickly and easily a customer can pick up key concepts ignite the sense of possibility.
The idea here is to instil good practices and set reasonable expectations. If you fail to do this when the onboarding honeymoon phase ends, you never will. Incentives at this stage of the journey will help businesses:
If you run an eCommerce site, for example, and offer new customers a reward for their first in-store shop, the customer has an immediate reason to return and engage with your brand. This sort of onboarding incentive also increases customer adoption rates across channels, increasing exposure to branded experiences. Other examples include:
Gives customers a welcome bonus for creating an account with your brand - you can leverage this type of incentive to raise awareness about particular products or services that align with business goals.
eReceipts provide a reason for customers to create a profile, track their purchases, review past experiences and validate contact details.
Customers who shop in-store first are offered a 'First Online Shop' bonus reward after their first online order is shipped. Customers who engage with more than one channel within the honeymoon period have a higher chance of brand engagement over time.
If a customer has only shopped once (or not at all) after joining, offer them one more enticing incentive to prevent them from exiting the phase with nothing new to show for all of your efforts
Encourage customers to give you all the vital information that allows you to provide them with more personalised and direct service and communication. Email and mobile are obvious, but favourite store, brand and style preferences and size information can all be extremely valuable in crafting experiences. Incentivising the sharing of this data is a strong progressive profiling strategy for the customers that you miss the first time around.
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Once a customer is successfully onboard, the focus is on nurturing that relationship so that they can remain happy and active. Fostering connections from the onboarding stage and throughout the customer lifecycle is crucial to business success and customer satisfaction over the long term, Incentive Programs are just one piece of the onboarding and retention pie; for more details on setting up for success, check out our foundations series.
Tess O’Brien
