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Engage Your Customers with Variable Rewards

A pair of scissors with a variable rewards sale sign in the middle.

Did you notice that people seem to like an activity more if it’s outcome is not obvious?

As shown by several studies, most people are, in fact, more motivated to complete a goal when the reward is unknown or uncertain.

This is called the motivating-uncertainty effect, and it’s coincidentally a great tactic for ecommerce lead generation.

Let me explain the principal quickly with a somewhat weird example.

Would you drink 1.4 liters of water under 2 minutes if I pay you for doing it? You would assume people would do it or not based on how much I’m offering to pay. Of course, the size of the reward is important, however, there is also another factor at play that’s worth paying attention to. It’s uncertainty.

When offered a fixed, sure amount of money for completing an arbitrary goal like this, people are less motivated compared to an uncertain reward. In fact, I would have a better chance at motivating someone by telling them that they can win $1 or $2 than if they are sure to get $2.

This water-drinking example actually comes from a study published in the Journal of Consumer Research, and the conclusion is backed by several further experiments, all of which looked at how people find uncertain rewards more motivating.

Now, let’s see how we can use this principle to our advantage and get more Facebook Messenger, email and SMS leads for our ecommerce store.

Most ecommerce brands incentivize signing up for a Facebook Messenger chatbot, an email newsletter or SMS discounts. Optimizing this funnel is key to running a successful online business, and merchants like you spend hours tweaking their popups, offers, and welcome messages, all in hopes of generating more leads to make more sales.

Recart has several features that helps thousands of ecommerce businesses optimize their on-site subscription strategy, including the Welcome Popup, Conversation Flows, and the Randomizer.

Let’s see how we can use these 3 Recart features to create our optimal on-site subscription funnel.

If you are new to Recart, you can sign up for a free account by installing Recart in the Shopify app store at apps.shopify.com/recart.

Setting up the Welcome Popup Conversation Flow

First of all, I’ll set up the Conversation Flow for my Welcome Popup. This is a simplistic and effective popup that will usually subscribe between 5-15% of your mobile visitors to your Messenger subscriber list.

In my first message, I focus on:

  • Getting the visitor’s attention
  • Showing off my friendly brand personality
  • Highlighting the 3 potential discounts, 1 of which they will unlock if they sign up to my Klaviyo newsletter

Collecting customer emails

I’ll add a Save user input element to the Conversation Flow that will prompt the customer to enter their email address.

Luckily, Recart pre-fills their email in Facebook Messenger, so all they really need to do is press a quick reply button and their email is automatically synced to my newsletter list in Klaviyo.

Randomizing discounts

After entering their email address, I, of course, want them to receive one of the 3 discount options selected randomly. The Randomizer element will allow me to do just that.

I simply create the 3 possible reward messages, and connect them to the outputs of the Randomizer.

I could also tweak the probabilities, for example if I had an especially valuable reward, I might want to set its chance to lower than my other rewards. But for now, I’ll leave them all around 33%.

Then, all I have to do is enable my Welcome Popup on the Conversation Starters page.

And with that, I have now set up a

  • Mobile-focused popup with an especially high conversion rate
  • An automation to collect customer emails
  • A variable reward to motivate customers to submit their email address

This approach allows me to take advantage of the motivating-uncertainty effect, and make more sales.

Try Recart now

To get started, simply head over to the Recart Dashboard and set up your Welcome Popup Conversation Flow.

If you are completely new to Recart, you can get started for free by installing Recart in the Shopify App Store.

This article originally appeared in the Recart blog and has been published here with permission.

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