One of the best ways to foster success is learning from the past. Past gifting experience can provide great demographic and incentive information that can be used to fine tune your future incentive strategy. At River Rock Marketing, we use historical gifting data to create a profile of your target market. This helps us better understand exactly who we are trying to reach, and what gift will be most appealing to them resulting in improved promotional response rates. There are three main trends to look at when reviewing past gift performance: Pricing, Category and Seasonality.

Pricing

The pricing used on the gift can help us understand market competitiveness. Most financial institutions compete with various offers for acquiring new accounts. Reviewing program results adjusted for seasonality can help us pinpoint the value an offer must have to win in your market.

Category

At River Rock Marketing, we also review categories of incentives used. What themes deliver great results? Household? Outdoors? Electronics? Once a winning category has been identified, we can match it to retail demographic data and determine with a high degree of certainty the characteristics of people that respond to the offer. We can then use the characteristics to forecast other incentive offers that will appeal to your target audience.

Seasonality

Past gifting experience can also provide insight into the seasonality of your new account trends. For most financial institutions, their account openings have an identifiable trend of production based upon calendar months. There are many factors that contribute to seasonality, including the geography of the branch network, the weather, the age of your market, and others.

Understanding the historical performance of incentive marketing programs in your financial institution can help us put the best gift with the best price in your lineup at the right time. The result is maximum performance for minimal price!