A robust rebate technology platform can simplify how you collect, process and report on the rebate claims submitted by your customers. It also helps ensuring a simple and straightforward process for customers that allows them to get their money back more quickly.
When combined with an expert team of strategists and the ability to configure and customize in order to solve your specific business needs, you can take your rebate incentive programs from a race to the bottom and turn it into a program that helps you steal market share.
To do this, your platform needs to make it quick and easy to launch new promotions—even those with complex rules that may require customization beyond what an out-of-the-box platform might support. This will help you understand how to leverage a rebate to grow share so you can create the most effective rule structure to drive purchases and deliver a great customer experience.
The ideal solution combines a highly configurable platform that allows for customization with an expert team of strategists. Rebates are a great reward for customers, but they are an even more important data collection tool.
Automate Customer Validation Process
The claim submission process must be simple and intuitive for the customer to provide their purchase information and receipt.
Validation built into the user interface (UI) confirms customers are entering valid information that will qualify for a reward in real time ensuring they don’t get too far down the path before being denied. Nothing ruins the mood like getting through a long claim process only to find out something you entered at the beginning was wrong and caused a denial.
Automatic system notifications keep the consumer updated on their claim status to mitigate confusion and reduce call center inquiries.
Paramount to your success will depend on how much time and budget your willing to invest to develop a strong user experience across all channels.
Be Flexible When Capturing Data
Data capture flexibility, beyond basic purchase information, is also key. Determining what information you need—not just for claim verification, but also for your reporting, dashboards, retargeting and any other future considerations you have—ensures you’ll have the right data at the right time to take action.
Flexible auditing rules, workflows and thresholds ensure the right level of verification is used. System automation—including AI and ML—can be used to confirm the validity of a claim to make sure you’re only paying out for qualifying purchases. The solution should also be flexible enough to allow you to adjust those rules based on actual claims, promotion data and trends identified in reporting. Some companies just want the claim data to approve or deny, while others see the invoice as a great way to capture data on the competition and are willing to increase the amount of data captured in order to use it for other initiatives.
Deliver Timely Claim Processing & Payouts
Timely claims processing and payouts are an expectation. As is the ability to support multiple award types in order to best motivate different types of audiences (e.g. prepaid cards, checks, merchandise, even things like PayPal). However, some programs might benefit from a longer payout cycle. And as we mentioned earlier, your technology should be flexible enough to fulfill a variety of requests.
Reporting and analytics not only provide real-time insights into program results but also give you a roadmap to help guide future decisions. Working upfront to define KPIs, create flexible filters and put all the information you need at your fingertips through embedded dashboards ensures you have real-time visibility into promotion performance. Even Fortune 500 companies can be in the dark on the impact of their promotions so having the ability to understand which stores are leveraging the promotion can help you make simple business decisions that improve the outcome of the promotion.
For example: After conducting a promotion analysis for one of our clients, we identified that over 800 locations—nearly half of their 2,000 total locations—had zero rebate redemptions. We also found a correlation between stores that utilized the rebate and higher revenue (i.e., the more rebates used, the more incremental revenue that store generated). Our simple recommendation was to get more stores to utilize the promotion.
The result? The stores that began adoption immediately saw an incremental sales increase during the promotion timeframe, validating that the promotion was in fact driving performance and that it wasn’t only top performing stores increasing sales.
Rebates Offer Far More Than Monetary Value
Your rebate technology platform can help simplify how you manage your rebate incentives and drive ROI for those promotions. However, an out-of-the-box technology solution with no strategy can only take you so far.
We can help you think four to five steps ahead in order to make sure your promotion delivers the incremental sales your brand needs. Let’s talk!