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Incentives & Rewards - Program Engagement

The Scope

A leading global distributor partnered with 360insights to boost engagement across their full program participant lifecycle. They needed to increase both earning and redemption activity and maintain strong program performance through a complex mid‑year rebrand.

The Challenge

360insights and the client honed in on a few key areas of improvement:

First, they needed to generate goal awareness so participants could easily see where they stood against Base and Stretch goals. Once this was established, the focus could shift to actually accelerating that goal achievement.

This meant figuring out how to:

• Increase earning activity (more points earned)

• Increase redemption activity (more points redeemed)

Plus, all of this needed to happen while maintaining continuity and engagement through a mid-year rebrand.

The Solution

Together, 360insights and the client completely overhauled the program engagement strategy, from the way goals were presented to how, when, and why participants were prompted to take action.

They:

• Reimagined the program’s visual identity and messaging. All participant-facing collateral was updated with a fresh look and feel that reinforced the new brand while keeping the core program value propositions front and center.

• Introduced multi-touch, progress-based e‑statements that were segmented by %-to-goal so participants received communications that matched where they actually were in the journey (General, 80–99% to goal, goal hit, stretch pursuit, stretch goal, stretch cleared).

• Layered in dynamic personalization across messages, including real-time progress bars, current points balance, and remaining percentage to goal. This made every touch feel like a live dashboard, giving participants instant clarity on how close they were and what to do next.

• Launched a contextual points-expiry campaign specifically designed to convert dormant balances into redemptions. Messaging was timed to key expiry windows and framed around “don’t leave value on the table” moments, helping participants quickly understand what they stood to lose (and how easy it was to redeem).

The Results

The revamped engagement strategy quickly translated into measurable lift across both earning and redemption behavior. Year over year, the client saw a 40% increase in points earned and a 50% increase in points redeemed, with velocity to goal increasing 10x following the program revamp and tier additions.

On the communications side, the new, segmented touch strategy significantly outperformed typical program benchmarks. Participant emails achieved a unique open rate over 50% and a total click‑to‑open rate (CTOR) above 16%, with milestone-driven emails consistently beating that average. The contextual points‑expiry campaign was especially effective, driving nearly a 30% CTOR as dormant balances were converted into redemptions.