Launching Cashback Rewards Programs: Build a Marketing Plan For Maximum Program Adoption - Part 3

This post continues our series on building a marketing plan to launch your cashback rewards program and successfully drive adoption among your customers. (If you haven't had a chance to read them yet, please go through Part 1 about setting rewards program goals and knowing your customer, and Part 2 which covered planning for the messaging and positioning of your program.)

Now we’ll dig into the tactical planning part - how to get the message out with your marketing channels, and how to measure results. Let's go!

Step 5: Marketing channel mix and execution plan

Your messaging and channels are defined. Now, it's time to create an execution plan and schedule that is informed by data and will get in front of the right audience at the right time. 

Are you a little unsure what "right audience" and "right time" might be? That's pretty common and this is the right phase where you have an opportunity to design a test plan so that you know the answer to those questions.

When thinking about the customer journey (which you would have defined in the previous step), what channels should your product messaging appear, how frequently, and in what priority of all other messaging?

Map out your user journey again with these details, including the size of the audience you are targeting for each:

• the timing of your campaign
• the frequency in which your target audience will be served the message
• the collateral details such as "branded email" or "long form landing page"
• the value proposition theme you will be using
• the single CTA for that channel
• the channel budget
• the key performance indicators you will be using to measure the performance of that channel

Mapping this out in such detail will not only help you to execute, but ensure that all factors of the marketing that your target is exposed to, strategically makes sense from end to end. 

For example, if you find that the value proposition differs greatly from one channel to the next, you need to ask yourself - "will that will help the user understand the product benefits or cause them to pause for any reason?"

Here is a Channel Mix template with some example channels defined in the top row, to help you start mapping out your execution plan for creating awareness and driving adoption for your cashback loyalty program. Use this to fill in all the marketing channels you have at your disposal and add the specifics for each in the rows below.

Step 6: Measure & Optimize

So you've launched your new cashback program and begun your marketing efforts based on your work to this point. Great!

Now you can sit back and watch the metrics and see how the needle moves from day to day or week to week, right?

Not exactly.

Sitting and waiting is a losing game, quite honestly. Instead, because you've created collateral that is measurable and flexible, you have the opportunity to do more than just wait around to see what happens in 4 weeks.

Study the metrics you have set up for each channel, understand how the channels may or may not be working together to drive a conversion, such as a customer installing your Chrome cash back browser extension.

Define which elements are winning and what could use improvement. This can be a call to action button, but it can also be where you find the most dropoff in the journey. Think about questions like:

• Which subject line drove the most email opens?
• Which email drove the most clicks?
• Which landing page drove the most traffic to the webstore?
• Which impression drove the most installs?

The results might surprise you – maybe you found that the 4th email impression drove the most installs and usually, you stop at only sending 1 email in all of your past campaigns.

It could be that one subject line gets the most opens, but not many clicks and instead, you saw a jump in webstore traffic that came from the landing page; this might be telling you that your customers see your email but don't like to click from emails and will do the extra work to google the offer.

Maybe a blog post outperforms all your emails, does that mean you never send an email again? No, it means you need to ask, what about that blog post captures the audience in a way that it quickly converts?

By immediately studying the data, you can optimize, and play your next move right away. Otherwise you lose valuable time during which you could be delighting more of your customers with cash back rewards offers in your new program.

We hope you have found this series helpful. We've found that our white-label cashback rewards platform clients benefit from this kind of strategic thinking around how to best drive adoption for their loyalty and rewards program, including cashback browser extensions. If you're considering working with Wildfire to implement a loyalty rewards program of your own, we look forward to partnering with you on the marketing planning!