Your customers are busy. Even customers who are big fans of your business might have trouble finding time to give their feedback. Gift card incentives can help. With the right strategy, gift cards can help you get all types of customer feedback, and help you move forward with the right information.
How to Use Gift Card Incentives to Get Customer Feedback
Let’s go through a step-by-step process to use gift card incentives to get customer feedback. Though every business’s strategy will be a bit different, you can use this as a blueprint for refining your own strategy.
What Type of Feedback Are You Looking For?
To use gift card incentives to get customer feedback, you first have to decide what type of feedback you’re looking for. Are you looking for feedback that you can use to bolster your marketing activities? Or, are you looking for feedback that will help you make adjustments to your business? Consider the following questions to decide what type of feedback you’re looking for. This will help you refine your strategy.
- Are you looking for reviews and testimonials that will bolster your reputation?
- Do you want input to show where you can improve your business?
- Are you looking for input on a specific topic, such as a particular product, or your check-out experience?
- Would you like to collect more quantitative data to help you compare performance year-over-year (such as an NPS® score), or are you looking for qualitative data with more detailed insights?
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Choose Your Questions
Now that you know what type of feedback you’re looking for, you’ll need to choose your questions. Asking the right questions is critical to get the right type of feedback. Consider the following types of questions.
Questions for testimonials and reviews
If your goal is to use gift cards to generate more reviews and testimonials, you’ll only need a few open-ended questions. You might ask a question like “how was your most recent purchase?” or “Did anything stand out about your most recent visit? Let us know!”
Questions for quantitative feedback
Quantitative feedback is measured by numbers. For this, it’s ideal to use a numeric measurement like Net Promoter Score℠ (NPS) or Customer Satisfaction Score. These measurements ask specific questions and their accuracy partially depends on receiving many responses.
Questions for qualitative feedback
Qualitative feedback is more detailed, and isn’t measured in numbers. If you’re seeking qualitative feedback about your business overall, you might ask several open-ended questions about the customer’s experience, such as “what did you enjoy most about your experience?” If you’re looking for detailed feedback on a specific area, ask about it directly with a question like “how was your checkout experience today?” or “how did this product work out for you?”
Choose Your Gift Cards
To use gift card incentives to get customer feedback, your gift cards should be relevant to your customers. If your customers are unlikely to find your gift cards useful, these won’t be a very effective incentive.
To find the right gift cards to incentivize customer feedback, it’s important to consider the following:
- What type of gift cards should you provide? You might provide gift cards to your own business to encourage more purchases, a gift card to a generally popular business, such as Starbucks, a cash card, or something else.
- How much should you spend? To decide how much you want to spend on this campaign, it’s important to consider the value of the feedback you receive. This will help you maintain positive ROI.
- How many gift cards should you use? With an amount determined, consider how you want to divide this up and how many participants you will reward.
- How will you manage your rewards? Once you’ve received customer feedback, consider how you will deliver the gift cards to your participants and what information you’ll need to do so.
Pick Your Tools
Managing your gift cards and the feedback you receive is an important part of this process. The right tools can help you categorize your feedback more easily and reward your customers seamlessly.
There are many different feedback collection tools to choose from. Which one works best for you will depend on what features you’re looking for, how many customers you want to survey, what type of questions you want to ask, and more.
The customer feedback tools you need should include:
- Organization tools: your software should have a way to organize quantitative data and qualitative responses, and tools like tags so you can organize responses regarding a specific topic.
- Gift card integration: with gift card integration included in your customer feedback software, you can manage all aspects of your campaign from one platform.
- Email automation: being able to contact your customers via email and integrate your feedback management tools into your email automation program will help you save time and energy.
- Landing page tools: the ability to create a landing page to administer your survey can help you increase responses.
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Send Your Feedback Requests!
With your plan in place, you need to notify your customers that you’re seeking feedback. There are many ways to ask for feedback from customers. Which works best for you will depend on how you communicate with your customers, what type of media they use or consume, and other factors. When you send your feedback requests, make sure you mention that your customers can receive gift cards in exchange for their feedback.
You might share your feedback requests in any of the following ways:
- Email survey: send an email to your list of customers and let them know you’re looking for their input.
Social media notifications: if you have a substantial following on any platform, make several posts and use a link to your survey landing page. - Website notification: use a non-invasive pop-up ad or a notification on your website’s sidebar, header, or footer.
- On-location: Use your brick-and-mortar location to notify patrons that you are looking for their feedback. You might use a short link to post on a bulletin board, menu, business card, or somewhere else noticeable.
Organize Your Feedback
Once you’ve received feedback, your campaign is nearly finished. To use the feedback you receive, you’ll need to organize it. There are several ways to do this, depending on the type of feedback you’re looking for.
- Tags: Giving your feedback tags as you collect it can help you organize. You might use tags to organize by topic, sentiment, or something else.
- Star rating: Connecting a star rating to your feedback can help organize it by positive, negative, or neutral.
- Length: Wordcount or, for video testimonials, time elapsed can help you categorize your testimonials by length and level of detail.
- Media type: File formats or tags can help you organize your feedback between text, pictures, and video.
Apply Your Feedback
With your feedback collected and organized, it’s time to apply it. This might mean taking some notes about changes you can make to a particular process or particular product. Or, you might want to collect your NPS or CSAT scores and average them, or compare them to previous scores. If you received testimonials and reviews, you might want to use these on your site or your marketing materials.
Once you’ve applied the feedback you’ve collected, your campaign is complete! If you didn’t receive the responses you expected, assess your strategy and see if you can make adjustments. If your campaign was successful, consider how you can apply this strategy and gather additional feedback at another time.
