Marketing
The new way to drive customer traffic and engagement: Virtual prepaid incentives
Fintech, daVinci Payments, has introduced the industry’s first loyalty and acquisition engine, the Payment Accelerator, that can boost customer engagement through texted virtual offers.
September 15, 2020 by Pat Shea — Editor, NetworldMedia
According to a report from the Pew Research Center 96% of Americans own a mobile phone of some kind, and a study by Gartner found text open rates are as high as 98%, making text communication one of the most cost-effective ways to reach consumers and drive substantial engagement.
Mobile Payments Today interviewed Rodney Mason, CRO for daVinci Payments, on its latest loyalty reward engine, Payment Accelerator, that sends mobile opt-in contacts a link to a virtual prepaid card with a personalized text offering. The funds are then stored in the phone and activated instantly in an app-like experience when the customer completes a desired action.
Q. How does the Payment Accelerator boosts engagement?
A. Payment Accelerator texts a virtual prepaid card to the phone with a call to action to activate it and store it on the phone. To activate the reward, the recipient must complete an action like a test drive, ordering food delivery, working a gig job on an unplanned day, referring a friend and using a link to find the closest participating merchant.
Q. How is engagement measured?
A. Engagement is measured by who clicks on the offer to load it into their phone and who visits the merchant to complete the prescribed task. The dashboard reports and tracks data including texts sent; texts read and clicked on; Splash Page visits; clicks; conversions; digital cards issued and unlocked; historical card activity or the history of the visitor over time; the number of visits per page unique visitors to the UX and each page's average user experience time.
Q. Is the virtual prepaid card linked to a specific reward, or does the user chooses or is it predestined?
A. The virtual prepaid offer is a specific reward, like $25, stored in the recipient's phone as a reminder to visit a merchant. The user completes the desired behavior to instantly activate the payment.
Q. Can you give an example of what the personalized text could be?
A. If, for instance, the client was a car dealer, the personalized text could be something like, "Here's your $25 virtual prepaid card. To activate it, just take a test drive in our ABC car. Click here to find the nearest participating dealer. Click here to store this card in your phone."
Q. How are the funds stored? Can users see their account to determine what rewards they have?
A. Credentials are stored on the phone and activated upon behavior. Once activated, the user has an online user experience account to see their balance and funds usage.
Q. What was the thinking behind the creation of this app?
A. Clients were requesting an unmatched compelling offer to drive more traffic to their business. We knew our first hurdle was the acceptance of an offer. Texting certainly would help with delivery as it has higher engagement and a lower cost associated than most other promotional deliveries. However, we also needed a highly compelling offer that was more than just a digital discount.
Our hypothesis was that the most powerful reward that consumers would accept and keep on their phone would be paying someone in advance to complete a desired behavior. It was a crazy idea but we believed that the vast majority of people would accept and store a reward on their phone, but we were concerned most would not complete the required behavior because they had already been paid. We then asked, 'What if we put the payment credentials on the phone in advance, but the reward itself would only be activated after the desired behavior was completed through Just-In-Time (JIT) payment solutions, allowing the merchant to instantly activate the payment upon completion of the task.
We then tested the concept in multiple studies in the US and other countries and we found that consumers of all ages and demographics would gladly use this product. We built the product and optimized the experience in select beta tests. Then COVID-19 hit and merchants suddenly needed more traffic than ever before. Our solution was custom built for driving traffic.
Q. How can the Payment Accelerator address customer behavioral shifts?
A. We conducted the Future of Payments studies in the U.S., U.K. and Canada and found a common theme: online is becoming the primary way the majority of shopping is done, and mobile is the way customers are accessing online shopping.
Pushing a prepaid card to a phone is now completely intuitive across age and income demographics. Additionally, card payments like prepaid cards are as popular as ever before because consumers want to be paid in ways that are widely accepted and easily work in new form factors like payment apps and digital wallets. The product provides significant increases in engagement, as compared to less effective—and often costly campaigns—such as paper coupons, mailers, point of sale programming and even email.
Q. How does this product stretch a user's budget?
A. The sender of the reward spends less on getting the offer out vs. any other delivery, with higher engagement. The reward is only activated when a behavior conversion takes place, typically a transaction. The reward literally, in real-time, pays for itself.
More than ever, brand marketers are looking for smart ways to stretch their budgets while driving greater success in their campaigns. Putting a virtual reward in hand is an unmatched enticing offer and delivering it through a text gets more opens and engagement than email.
Q. Have you tested how customers like the virtual reward?
A. We have tested the Payment Accelerator and we are seeing a significant rise in virtual rewards across our business from consumers who have choice of virtual or physical cards. Our Future of Payments Study identified that payees want immediacy with payments that load into new form factors like payment apps and digital wallets. Virtual prepaid is the fastest and easiest way to do this.
Q. Do the virtual rewards ever expire?
A. Virtual rewards have an expiration date for activation and a use-by-date from the time of activation, which is chosen by our customers.
Q. Does the Payment Accelerator easily integrate with a user's system or is it independent of it?
A. Payment Accelerator offers a simple API integration that's easy to use and empowers clients to control the process as much as they want. If they so choose, they really only have to upload or provide offer messaging and contacts.
Q. Why do you believe in this product?
A. Payment Accelerator is unmatched in the market, a fresh idea that's highly captivating, intuitive to how consumers shop and transact, quick and easy to set up and specifically designed to solve merchants' biggest challenge; driving traffic online and in-store.
Recipients don't have to worry about holding onto coupons with this immediate, behavior-based redemption process. Any company that accepts card transactions can launch a Payment Accelerator campaign and get their promotions to market faster, more affordably. It's a win-win for everyone.
Q. Are there challenges or must-haves that customers need to be aware of with the product?
A. If brands do not have mobile data, the experience can still work with email.
About Pat Shea
Related Media
Subscribe
Get the latest news and resources from Retail Customer Experience.
Recent Posts
