Health and Wellness Incentives Provide Fertile Ground for Customer Engagement

Health And Wellness Customer Engagement As health care costs continue to soar, many organizations are starting to emphasize preventative care to alleviate the massive expenses associated with medical treatment. This shift is good news for incentive-based customer engagement programs, which fundamentally revolve around modifying behaviors through various rewards. As this trend continues, many exciting and lucrative new customer engagement opportunities are starting to arise for marketers.

Chuck Christianson, Senior Vice President of Sales, Account Management & Client Solutions at Connexions Loyalty, expanded on this theme during a Q & A panel presentation at the Apex All Payments Expo in Las Vegas last week.

During the presentation titled, Incentives: Gaining More Ground in the Current Environment, which also included Kevin Green of Fandango and Nicole Hardey of Groupon, the speakers viewed health and wellness as an emerging trend that presented new verticals in the rapidly changing incentive and loyalty program rewards space.

“We sell roughly half a billion dollars’ worth of gift cards through financial institution programs today,” Christianson explained. “If I was to figure out where the next half a billion was coming from in the next five to 10 years, it would be promoting wellness across the spectrum of insurers in the United States.”

A significant factor in Christianson’s analysis was also based on new political legislation that supports preventative care as a way to stimulate public health. Specifically, Christianson cited the Affordable Care Act, which raised the amount of money employers are allowed spend to promote the wellness of employees from 20% to 30% of the total cost of health coverage. This number increases to 50% for programs designed to prevent or reduce tobacco use.

Green also agreed with this assessment.

“Health is a very important vertical for Fandango. It’s one we’re continuing to put even more resources toward in the future,” he explained. “You have big hospital conglomerates, big insurance companies, and blood banks all trying to incentivize people to do certain things like donate blood, eat healthier, enroll in a regimented exercise program, or sign up for a specific medical plan. So that is a huge opportunity for us in the incentive side, and Obamacare is only expediting the rush.”

In addition to rising healthcare costs and changes to the political landscape, the universal upsurge of digitization is also playing a key role. This is not only true with regards to the data collected from wearable health trackers such as the Fitbit, but also with the immediacy such networked technology offers. Immediate gratification is a big part of successful incentivized customer engagement programs, and now rewards can be delivered via micro redemptions directly to a smartphone.

“Imagine if you have a threshold set up in a wellness program and you have to hit 3,000 steps,” Christianson explained. “And an employer sets up a threshold that says if you took 5,000 steps in one day, then you would get a $5 gift card, and it would be delivered to you on your smartphone instantly. That is a big deal, to be able to steer behavior in real time.”

Brands have historically viewed such “micro redemptions” as insignificant because their main focus has always been on motivating consumers to save up points and build currency. But the instantaneousness of the digital revolution has changed everything, especially now that we live in what Christianson calls an “experience economy.”

“Micro redemptions are huge,” he explained. “They create more points of high engagement and more frequent engagement. They can get in front of you, and rather than rewarding you with $300 at the end of the year, they can reward you multiple times. And that is more important to creating an overall experience.”

Incentivized health and wellness customer engagement programs are going to be big real estate in the near future. Once people are incentivized to take Health And Wellness Customer Engagementwellness seriously, the health care premium offsets are going to equal money in the bank for organizations. Many companies in Silicon Valley, and across the country, can already see the long-term value in these trends and they are beginning to act.

“As that entire ecosystem matures, the incentives are going to be there,” Christianson added. “And if you’re primly positioned in that space, you can be part of that cycle and be able to take advantage of that opportunity,” Christianson said. “That’s what’s coming.”

Recent Content

Membership and Pricing

Videos and podcasts

Membership and Pricing