Digital marketers know it from their data: The online buyer-seller relationship is on the rocks. The causes are plain to see.
- Consumers are barraged with messages. They’re hounded by urgent tones, remarketing ads, notifications and emailers, and their social media icons light up with red alert buttons begging them to click. They can’t keep up with all the things they’ve searched for, saved or liked, and the growing automation of advertising and marketing means this cacophony will only increase.
- Universal discounting is eroding trust. Today’s consumers crave personalization, but broadcast discounts and offers disappear into the background of white noise. Brands jump on a discount treadmill in response, but that erodes margins and brand value. Consumers expect brands to understand what they want and to provide tailored user experiences.
- Customer acquisition costs are rising. Fighting for consumer attention through Google and Facebook requires more and more money. Ad spend is up while conversion rates are dropping.
In this “attention economy,” one-to-one engagement with buyers is critical. Marketers have been adjusting their customer acquisition strategies for messaging and have been rewarded for it. Offers and discounts, however, have been left in the dark ages of broadcast marketing—until now.
Gated offers—protected, exclusive promotions that brands provide to highly targeted groups—are emerging as a powerful tool for creating more personalized promotions and increasing growth.
How Gated Offers Boost Customer Acquisition
Many marketers find themselves on a discount treadmill. They interrupt users with generic discount offers that shoppers may not even want. This can erode a company’s profit margins and brand value.
The new gated offer paradigm invites users to become customers by accepting exclusive offers available only to their group, such as teachers, seniors, military personnel, students, or other market segments.
Brands like Urban Outfitters, T-Mobile, and Target are using such programs to improve sales, create brand loyalty, and secure repeat business. New technology makes the process simple and efficient. Here’s how it works:
- You define your offer and select the group you want to target.
- Prospects who want to redeem your offer provide a few points of personal, privacy-friendly information, such as email address and date of birth.
- SheerID’s Digital Verification Platform instantly confirms their eligibility as a seamless part of the checkout process.
- The reward is applied to the shoppers’ purchase.
- You use the data collected to nurture and retain them.
This frictionless digital verification ensures that only eligible shoppers can redeem your offer. No more freeloading by unpaid users or sharing of discount codes.
And it’s easy to implement. SheerID just announced a new release of its platform that gives marketers the freedom and autonomy to create DIY campaigns, from setting them up, to tracking and reporting on them. And these campaigns are proven to be popular with the audiences you target.
Why Gated Offers Are a Highly Effective Customer Acquisition Strategy
Gated offers are a powerful technique to target and protect promotions. Over two-thirds of Americans said gated offers are more important than traditional coupons that are available to everyone. And gated offers evoke incredibly positive feelings: 54% of shoppers said gated offers make them feel rewarded, and 48% said gated offers make them feel excited.
Gated offers have such a profound effect because they tap into a deep sense of belonging. Offers available exclusively to members of a group appeal to their collective identity. This makes them feel valued, boosts the speed and amount of their spending, and inspires greater loyalty to the brand.
The Solution for Gated Offers: SheerID’s New Digital Verification Platform
SheerID harnesses the power of gated offers by allowing marketers to target and instantly verify multiple high-value segments.
In addition to US students (25 million buyers with $574 billion in spending power), teachers (6.7 million educators with $2.2 billion in spending power), and the military (37 million buyers with $1 trillion in spending power), you can reach:
- Seniors, a group that’s 109 million strong, controls 75 percent of the nation’s wealth and has $3.2 trillion in spending power.
- International students in more than 100 countries, a population of 137 million.
- Young adults (or any life stage).
- Small business owners.
- Employees (for employee and partner discounts).
- First responders (police, firefighters, EMTs).
- Professionals on your customer target list.
SheerID’s powerful new features were developed to make gated offer programs highly strategic and efficient. The platform update introduces Composer, a self-service tool that lets you create and manage a gated offer program, upload reward pools, and push your campaign live in minutes.
It also allows you to easily modify ongoing programs and white label campaigns, using your brand’s colors and fonts in the verification form. You can also layer gated discounts on top of other promotions, to accommodate big sale days.
The dashboard provides granularity and data visualization for bottom-line metrics. These include conversion rate, sales, average order value, and the amount of discount abuse avoided. The system quickly serves up the information you want through customizable reports, as well as a customer search function that returns specific consumer verifications upon request.
Admin and user controls make it simple to manage access to editing capabilities, programs and reports, providing visibility while keeping customer information secure.
How Gated Offers Improve Your Bottom Line
Discount abuse, such as sharing passwords to gain access to special rates, is a rampant problem that siphons revenue. In our shopper study , we found that 59 million Americans have redeemed a gated offer when they knew they really didn’t qualify, most often through using a code or link forwarded to them by a friend.
Companies that create and protect gated offers for target segments eliminate this discount abuse. They also acquire more customers at lower cost. An ongoing campaign by a leading streaming music service earns a 98% conversion rate. And other companies using SheerID average a 3X increase in conversions.
Use Gated Offers To Revitalize Your Digital Marketing
SheerID’s Digital Verification Platform is part of a game-changing customer acquisition strategy for brands that want to recruit new shoppers more cost-effectively, boost repeat sales, and ensure that customers who subscribe to a service at a discount convert to full price when their eligibility expires.
Join companies like Comcast, Urban Outfitters, Amazon, and HBO Now who are leading on this new approach to the buyer-seller relationship.
Download The Definitive Guide to Gated Offers and see how SheerID’s five-point plan can help you acquire new, long-term customers.
