Twenty uses for Gas and Grocery Incentive Certificates

In case you haven’t heard of gas and grocery incentive programs, they work like this: You, the retailer, buy a large number of certificates for free gas and groceries at a greatly discounted rate (pennies on the dollar).
You then offer these certificates as an incentive for customers to buy your merchandise. Historically, these types of incentives have worked well, and the gas and grocery incentives are very popular due to the rising cost of both fuel and food in these tough economic times. The traditional use of these free gas and grocery vouchers is to offer a customer one of these certificates if they buy a certain dollar amount of merchandise from you. Although that works quite well, there is so much more you can use these gas and grocery certificates for. This article will give you a list of ideas.

Use gas and grocery incentive certificates to:

· in exchange for scheduling in-home sales demonstrations
· get a customer lead to come in and hear your sales pitch
· get new customers to sign up for new services
· to get customers to extend the length of their service agreements
· get dormant customers to order new or repeat services
· encourage customers to make big purchases
· as customer loyalty rewards for repeat business
· reward customers who refer new customers to you.
· to get more traffic for seasonal businesses (like landscaping) during off-months
· to encourage customer spending during economic downturns
· to attract big crowds for grand opening events
· to create free advertising through a local media buzz
· to win out over competitors who normally could undersell you
· as the prize for employee sales competitions
· to encourage employees to hit sales goals
· as employee attendance or safety rewards
· use a few certificates cards for your company’s vehicle fleet – everyone likes free gas, even you!

For Non-Profit Organizations:

· to encourage higher donations during fundraising
· as prizes for raffles or other contests
· to generate attendance and sell more seats at seminars

As you can see, there are tons of ways to use gas and grocery incentive certificates. A little creative thinking will take you a long way. As a general rule of thumb, the trick is to find out what the key is to making a sale, then offer the gas and grocery incentive certificates to get customers to do just that.

Let me give you an example. In automotive sales, for example, if you can get the customer behind the wheel for a test drive, the chances that they’ll buy the vehicle rises dramatically. Knowing this, a car dealership in New York ordered 700 gas certificates, and offered them to customers during a weekend event in exchange for just coming in and taking a car for a test drive. By 5:00 AM the morning of the event, they had people lined up outside the door. By the end of the first day, they had to place an emergency phone call to order more gas certificates just to make it through the weekend. The sales campaign worked so well, that dealership now orders 5,000 gas certificates per month on a regular basis.

If you try a gas or grocery incentive-based sales campaign, tinker with different approached and conditions for customers to get the incentive certificates. Experiment and find the approach that works best for your particular business.

Michael Goulet - Team Leader
Direct Strategies, Inc.
"The Incentive Pros!"
http://incentivesgroceryandgas.com
w-612-377-5262
Fax-480-304-9095
michaelg@freegrocerycenters.com