How to turn your customers into advocates with gift card inventives
Your customers are the best advocates for your business—encourage their feedback with Tango. We make it easy to incentivize customer referrals, reviews, and testimonials with e-gift cards.
Send and track e-gift card incentives in one easy place. With our free incentive solutions, there’s no middleman and no additional fees.
How to use gift card incentives for customer advocacy programs
By encouraging referrals and sharing positive customer reviews, many of our clients have found success building their brands and driving new business. How are they doing it? With e-gift card incentives. Here’s a look at common approaches for using e-gift cards to incentivize referrals, reviews and testimonials, and customer feedback.
Referrals
Reviews and testimonials
Customer feedback
User-generated content is useful to you for a variety of reasons. Here’s what you can do with the information you collect from your customers:
Best practices for sending gift card incentives
Make your offer desirable
The key to creating a successful customer advocacy program often comes down to how desirable your offer is. Ultimately, you want the value of your reward to match the size of your ask. Here are some general examples from our customers:
- $5–$10 to an existing customer when they’ve completed a survey
- $10–$25 to an existing customer when their review is submitted or verified
- $25–$50 to a referrer when their referred contact participates in a demo
- $50–$100 to a referrer when their referred contact makes a sale
You know your customers best—so consider the reward value that would be most appealing to them.
Clearly list your offer criteria
You risk losing participants if your offer is confusing or overly complicated. You can avoid this by clearly listing your offer criteria. For example: Publish a review on Capterra and you’ll receive a $10 gift card once it’s verified. This example clearly states the task and the reward value. For more complex offers, you can add additional information—such as offer dates or reward limitations.
Communicate your offer
Once you’ve finalized the details of your offer, the next step is to spread the word. See common strategies below.
How to communicate your offer
Newsletters and emails
These are ideal places to include a mention of your offer.
Social media posts
Do you have a following on social media? Post your offer a couple times each month.
Website mentions
Include a mention of your offer on your website.
Physical flyer
Create a flyer about your offer to post in your lobby or office.
On-Hold Messages
Add a mention of your offer to your company’s on-hold message.
Employee Involvement
Educate your staff about the offer and ask them to mention it to customers after completing a service.
Track every reward you send
Any e-gift card you deliver should be tracked. Here are the most important details to include in your reports:
- Name of gift card sender
- Name of gift card recipient
- Email or address of gift card recipient
- Reason gift card was sent
- Gift card amount
- Date gift card was sent
Why gift cards are ideal for customer advocacy
The data is on your side when it comes to incentivizing referrals and reviews. Based on the numbers from our own referral program, 83% of satisfied customers are willing to make a referral when offered an incentive while only 29% make one unprovoked.
The question is: Why use gift cards? Alternative options like cash or a discounted service are common incentives, but they come with potential drawbacks.
- Cash rewards—By offering a cash reward to customers, you risk becoming unmemorable. According to the Incentive Research Foundation, non-cash rewards outperform cash rewards because recipients often use the cash to pay for everyday expenses—like utilities, groceries, or car payments.
- Discounted services or products—A discounted service or product is a great value, but you’ll want to consider if it’s enticing enough to secure a referral or review.
The benefits of gift card incentives:
Customers like having a choice
When it comes to receiving rewards, your customers love having a choice—and the ability to choose is exactly what e-gift cards provide. They also arrive instantly, making customer satisfaction immediate.
Gift cards are budget friendly
The majority of our reward solutions are completely free, which means 100% of your budget goes to the incentive in most cases. You don’t even need a large budget for your program to be successful—try starting small.
Gift cards offer digital advantages
Our digital reward catalog has 1,000+ of the most popular gift card brands, saving you time that normally would be spent at the store buying gift cards directly.
What it's like to work with Tango
When you work with us, there’s no middleman. You can independently manage your incentives in one easy dashboard. We’re a full-service partner that offers multiple incentive solutions, making it easy for you to deliver, manage, and track e-gift cards—with no additional fees. You can even send incentives in the programs you’re already using.
Our integrations make your incentive program easier by connecting many of the systems and apps you use to our reward delivery portal—including Zapier and Salesforce. Learn about all our incentive solutions below.
Products that meet every business need
Our incentive solutions put business owners and professionals like you in control. Ultimately, you decide when and how incentives are sent to your customers. We offer multiple solutions to meet different business needs. Keep in mind, there isn’t a single way to use our reward solutions—and there’s no right or wrong answers. Below is an overview of our reward-delivery solutions that help our clients build the best customer advocacy programs.
The Tango portal
Use our free web portal to manage your reward and incentives programs. In this self-serve portal, you can:
- Order Reward Links, in bulk or one at a time, which are immediately delivered to recipients
- Create custom email templates
- Create and fund accounts, check balances, and view funding history
- Manage user access and permission levels
- Review order history and download reports
- Resend rewards with the click of a button
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Reward Link
Reward Link is the standard reward offering in Tango, and for good reason. This gift of choice, which is our most popular option, gives your employees a wide selection of desirable gift cards. With Reward Link, you can instantly send rewards to the inboxes of your customers on an email template that’s branded with your logo and messaging.
Rewards as a Service API
To directly integrate rewards within your internal systems, your development team may be interested in an API integration. Our API is built to power rewards and incentives in apps and platforms. It contains multiple methods to support simple reward automation or platform-wide implementation. With our API, you can:
- Access our catalog of 350+ e-gift cards, prepaid cards, and donations
- Have us send your e-gift cards on branded email templates or deliver them within your user interface
- Use our catalog, which contains descriptions, disclaimers, reward images, and other brand details
- Access order history, track email delivery, and resend rewards
Software as a service integrations
With our integtration options, you can send and automate rewards in the systems you’re already using. We can integrate Tango with your CRM, MAS, and task automator to drive results. We already have native integrations with Salesforce, Qualtrics, and Zapier.
What other professionals are saying
Tango has made it very easy to implement a referral rewards system. It saves me time and gives the recipient flexibility!
Easy-to-use platform, streamlined process for redemption, overall great product to distribute gift cards.
Tango provides an easy and painless way to directly integrate rewards and gift cards into our service.
From saving time and money to improving engagement and customer experiences—here’s why our clients work with us.
Of the surveyed professionals that work with us, 88% have saved time and 68% have saved money.
Support for you and your customers
Our support team isn’t just available to you, it’s available to your customers too. We’re happy to provide support to all your gift card recipients, so you’re not left fielding redemption questions or troubleshooting technical issues.
Simplified, easy reporting
When you work with us, there’s no need to maintain spreadsheets or tracking documents. We offer simplified, easy reporting in one free dashboard. You can pull data for a single customer or view reports at a company or department level. Our platform was built with you and your workflow in mind to ensure any reports and tracking stay organized with minimal effort.
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