All posts in Optimizing PunchTab Program(s)

Add Gamification and Customize Badge Positions

Posted by francois on March 28, 2012

A few months ago PunchTab added Badges and Achievements to our offerings, helping website and blog owners to increase engagement with users by adding a little gamification.

Shortly after we launched PunchTab Badges, we heard some feedback that publishers wanted to customize the badge position…. so we got to work! And now- you’re now able to display the Badges button on any corner of your page- just like you can with the Loyalty Program.

This new option is available on the installation page for all the platforms we support (Joomla, Drupal, Ning, Blogger and of course the Java Code snippet for the others) and for the tech-savvy who can’t wait, here is the snippet with position option:

<script charset="utf-8" type="text/javascript">

  var _btq = _btq || [];

  var _punchtab_settings_badges = {

    key: "YOUR_KEY",

    position: {x: "right", y: "top"} // left or right and top or bottom

  };



  (function() {

    var pt = document.createElement('script'); pt.type = 'text/javascript'; pt.async = true;

    pt.src = ('https:' == document.location.protocol ? 'https://' : 'http://') + 'test.punchtab.com:8000/static/js/pb.js';

    var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(pt, s); })();

</script>

Stay tuned, we’ve got awesome new features arriving soon for the badges!

Comments: 100 Tags: badges, customer engagement, customization, gamification, loyalty, PunchTab

4 Reasons to Add a Loyaty Program to your Website, Blog or ECommerce Site.

Posted by Angela Sanfilippo on March 28, 2012

If you haven’t seen it yet, PunchTab released our latest product, CRUSH, that helps websites measure social influence and improve website engagement. See the video from the Launch Festival from our co-founder, Ranjith. As a marketer, I was salivating because I was finally able to access the data that would help me calculate the difference in consumer behavior when incentives are introduced.

Because there are so many opinions out there about loyalty programs, what true loyalty is, etc. Let me state my position on loyalty first. PunchTab calls our platform a loyalty platform but in reality what we do is incentivize people to take an action. It’s up to you to make ‘em loyal with a great product, great content, great service and a great brand. We give you a platform and mechanisms to encourage your customers to engage and incentives that reward them for doing so. So when I say loyalty members versus non-loyalty members, I am speaking in the truest sense of the word. These are people who engage with a PunchTab powered program versus people who don’t.

This isn’t a controlled study. Yes, some of these people would have taken these actions with or without an incentive. There are a lot of factors and variables that impact these numbers, but without over-complicating things I just want to share the data because it’s still pretty darn extraordinary.

The Data Sample:

The data I pulled is based on 16M consumers across the PunchTab network of roughly 6000 -7000 sites:

Only 1% of the audience were loyalty members. Most sites will see anywhere from 2-10% of customers or users join the loyalty program (unless you are an online retailer). This number is lower because it’s pulling data from all of our sites including new sites that just joined and haven’t had a chance to build out their loyalty program. The 1% is important because…

80% of social activity came from that 1%. Yep! 80% of social sharing from 1% of the audience.

The Results:

Loyalty members

1. Share 1200X MORE

2 Comment/contribute to the conversation 200X as much

3. Visit 11X more often

4. Consume 16X the content…

…as non-loyalty members

I talk to a lot of companies from all walks of life every day and they are either looking to:

1. Build their social following
2. Increase their social or online presence
3. Increase acquisition or conversion
4. Increase engagement
5. All of the above

A PunchTab powered giveaway will allow you to do all of that in the short term and a loyalty program will allow you to sustain that in the long term. If you’re not sure how, read this post on a recent giveaway. If you need help doing this with your loyalty program, check out all of the actions you can reward users for taking to support any or all of your goals above. And remember, PunchTab is a tool for rewarding customers. It’s up to you create true brand loyalty. But I won’t lie when I say, loyalty programs are still running for a reason. Because they work. The numbers don’t lie.

I’d love to hear your feedback.

–Angela

Comments: 65 Tags: acquisition, CRUSH Score, engagement, loyalty, PunchTab, rewards, social

How to reward users for opting-in, signing up, visiting a page and more!

Posted by Angela Sanfilippo on January 17, 2012

Many of our users still don’t realize that there are almost 20 additional actions you can reward-enable using PunchTab’s JS SDK. I created an FAQ on our Knowledge Base that has the code you need to get started.

For those of you like me, don’t let the “JS SDK” scare you. It’s actually quite simple to copy and paste this code and add it to many of the things you are already doing.

***BONUS: If you click on the link above, you’ll see that I actually reward-enabled clicking on the link.***

You can choose to reward-enable without telling people (our customer Thwipster does this as an extra “thank you” to customers who can use their points towards future purchases), OR you can highlight the fact that visitors, users and customers can earn bonus points. How can you incentivize them if they don’t know about it!. You choose what’s right for your business.

Here are some examples I KNOW many of you can put into practice right away:

1. Reward-enable your newsletter or email opt-ins. You can do this 3 ways: when someone clicks the submit button, when the confirmation page loads using HTML or AJAX. If you already have this page, all you need to do is add the snippet of code.

2. Rewarding the submission of ANY form. You can use the same code for email opt-ins for forms. Reward people for creating accounts, signing up, etc. Add this to any or all of your forms or confirmation pages.

3. Visting a page. We all have specific pages we want people to see. Drive more traffic to featured content or featured sites (such as your Facebook page or YouTube channel). Why don’t you check out PunchTab’s YouTube channel and earn more points!

4. Downloading a document or file. B2B marketers, publishers, app developers, etc may want to drive people to download a whitepaper, eBook, free app or user guide. Give ‘em that extra little nudge. You already have these documents or files on your website so add the code snippet to reward-enable it.

Check out the complete list and earn 10 points!

Comments: 87 Tags: announcements, customer loyalty, developers, loyalty program, mobile loyalty, PunchTab, rewards, SDK

The second largest search engine isn’t Bing or Yahoo

Posted by Angela Sanfilippo on January 13, 2012

It’s YouTube. Many people know this, some people don’t. But regardless, now that they’ve launched some great new features (and if you’re like us), it’s time to get started taking video more seriously.

Step 1. Get the new YouTube interface. You can simply go to your channel and you should be prompted to check it out.

Step 2. Get videos.

I know, right? Seems simple but many people think this is a lot harder than it is. Where do you begin? Product videos? Sure, those are good. But there may be more videos out there that your users or customers may have already created for you.

So why not leverage it? There are tons of PunchTab videos on YouTube and all we have to do is add them to our favorites so anyone viewing our channel can see them.

If the goal is to create awareness, then the more content out there about you the better. So don’t fight it, use it!

User generated videos are also great. Run a giveaway with PunchTab asking people to create videos and paste them in a link in the comments section. If you’re using Facebook comments on your blog, you’ll get even more reach because your users networks will also be able to like and comment on the videos they’ve just shared.

Step 3. Reward people for visiting your YouTube channel.

I bet you didn’t know that you can award points for visiting your YouTube channel. Here’s how:

In a typical page you may have a button or a link that say: Check us out on YouTube. And your HTML may look like:

<a href="http://www.youtube.com/user/punchtab"> Check us out on YouTube!</a>

All you need to to is add the code in red:

<a href="http://www.youtube.com/user/punchtab" onClick='_ptq.push(["view",{"points":10}]);'> Check us out on YouTube! </a>

So, how 'bout you see it in action and actually check out our YouTube channel?

Step 4. Leverage all those great videos on your site and reward-enable them.

Our founder, Ranjith, created a couple of blog posts on this. Read the post, get the code and see a demo of it.

Comments: 64 Tags: how to, loyalty, reward videos, youtube

Reward Users for Following You on Twitter

Posted by mehdi on January 6, 2012

There are many ways to use our PunchTab JavaScript SDK to custom reward-enable anything on your website.

One implementation that we hear users asking for often is how to use PunchTab’s Loyalty programs to increase followers on Twitter.

Below is a quick tutorial on how to accomplish this:

Notes:

Follow button : http://twitter.com/about/resources/buttons#follow
More about JS SDK : http://blog.punchtab.com/index.php/2011/08/reward-enable-your-website-javascript-sdk-tutorial/

Code:

<body>
<div id="container">
	<h2>This page has only one goal : get you to follow me on twitter</h2>
        <div style="width:100%;height:500px;line-height:600px;text-align:center;">
            <a href="https://twitter.com/PunchTab" data-show-count="true" data-lang="en" data-size="large">Follow @PunchTab</a>
       </div>
</div> <!--! end of #container -->

<script type="text/javascript" charset="utf-8">
  window.twttr = (function (d,s,id) {
    var t, js, fjs = d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];
    if (d.getElementById(id)) return; js=d.createElement(s); js.id=id;
    js.src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"; fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js, fjs);
    return window.twttr || (t = { _e: [], ready: function(f){ t._e.push(f) } });
  }(document, "script", "twitter-wjs"));
</script>

<script type="text/javascript" charset="utf-8">
  var _ptq = _ptq || [];
  var _punchtab_settings = {
    key: "<YOUR KEY>",
    display: "tab",
    position: {x:"left", y:"bottom"}
  };

  (function() {
    var pt = document.createElement('script'); pt.type = 'text/javascript'; pt.async = true;
    pt.src = ('https:' == document.location.protocol ? 'https://' : 'http://') + 'static.punchtab.com/js/pt.js';
    var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(pt, s);
  })();
</script>

</body>

Have fun and watch your followers increase!

Comments: 54 Tags: customer loyalty, followers, PunchTab, rewards, Twitter

Customers Are Worth More Than Just What They’re Buying

Posted by Angela Sanfilippo on November 9, 2011

Today’s loyalty programs really focus on three things:
1. Getting customers to buy more
2. Guy customers to buy more often
3. As a result of 1&2, increasing the overall lifetime value of a customer

Referral programs encourage customers to drive more word-of-mouth. In exchange for their referrals, they get discounts, cash or free products.

But what about social sharing?
There is a lot of value in getting people simply to:
a. Share your page with others
b. Connect with you on social
c. Tweet about you
d. +1 you (to be honest, I’m not seeing the value in that, yet, but Google promises there will be)
e. Invite friends

However, few marketers are actually incentivizing that behavior. Now, I just came from Zuberance, a SaaS solution for driving advocacy via social recommendations, so yes, @robfuggetta, I do believe that a company’s biggest advocates don’t need to be incentivized. But what about everyone else? You’ve got them to your door, why not nudge them (just a bit) to do more?

If you don’t agree, consider the above actions again:
a. Share your page with others: What do you pay-per-click to drive that very same traffic? What’s your CPM just to get your brand in front of others?

b. Connect with you on social: How much effort do you have to go through to get someone to sign-up to receive anything from you? Not to mention, the opportunity with social goes well beyond email and, for goodness sakes, snail mail. Social works so well because you are connected to your users in REAL TIME and if you’ve done your job well, THEIR social networks. In fact, Ad Age did a study that shows posts get 2X the clicks and conversion from posts shared by their friends than brand initiated posts.

c. Tweet about you: Again, I don’t think I need to repeat myself. Twitter drives impressions and high click volume because it’s a clicking medium. While conversion does seem to be lower overall, how many times have you actually paid to get someone to click and view your ad?

d. +1 you: If Google does it’s job right (and I by no means am a believer quite yet) search becomes social and then it will be about HOW you’re rated AND IF you’re rated that will impact those search rankings you’ve worked so hard for.

e. Invite friends: Alas, we are back to referral programs 101. Marketers have been doing it for years but it’s never had the reach it does now. Companies like Dropbox offer free storage to drive referrals, my housing development is offering $2500 cash if we get a friend to buy and lots of others offer other freebies, SWAG or discounts. BUT they usually only pay up if someone actually purchases, not for simply giving you a shout out.

So what can you do?
1. Start thinking beyond passive sharing. With a little nudge you’ll find a lot more of your users, visitors and customers will share pages and content if you offer them up something in return. Share widgets, while becoming more popular for sharing content, don’t exactly work for getting people to share product pages, websites, or to connect with on social channels.

2. Be creative with your rewards. No one said it had to be expensive. Offer up SWAG, donations to public charities or free upgrades or add-ons that actually increase usage and adoption (and thereby retention). It’s a win-win.

3. Measure it. It’s time to start measuring the value of social sharing, following and referrals like you do your other programs in order to understand the ROI and justify the costs. How many shares are you getting, how many fans and followers, how many inbound clicks? Put a value against that. Shares = impressions, fans and followers are worth the same you pay for an email address or lead, inbound click = CPC.

Net net, there’s value in a customer beyond what they buy. Social has made a consumers reach electronic and exponential. Stop looking at them with a $ sign and start looking at a shoe shopper (who maybe can’t afford that pair of boots right now) as someone whose value comes from sharing those boots with their girlfriends. But don’t expect something for nothing. This shopper may need some “convincing”. So give ‘em the opportunity to earn rewards. You get an opportunity to build a relationship with them (because if they earn, the odds are they’ll return) and you get to share a message with their network. You turned a passive shopper into an opt-in and an advertiser. Now THAT is worth paying for.

Comments: 32 Tags: best practices, convert customers, customers, Facebook, giveaways, loyalty, optimize, PunchTab, rewards, social sharing, Twitter

Improving the performance of your loyalty program

Posted by mehdi on September 26, 2011

The PunchTab team is obsessed with testing. We’re proud that we get to power the loyalty programs for so many really great bloggers, brands, and businesses and we don’t take that responsibility lightly. So we’ve become obsessed with testing and tweeking. And as a result, we’re adding more features every week.

One of the key metrics we keep a close eye on is the number of points that we distribute, and this past week was one of our biggest weeks to date, distributing over half a million points in just a few days. (Pretty exciting!)

As our platform grows, we’re making modifications to help improve the performance of your loyalty program. Today we’re announcing an important change to to the Jave Script snippet that you pasted in your website.

If you had a JS snippet that looked like this:

var is_ssl = ("https:" == document.location.protocol);
var asset_host = is_ssl ? "https://www.punchtab.com/" : "http://www.punchtab.com/";
document.write(unescape("%3Cscript src='" + asset_host + "s/js/pt.js' type='text/javascript'%3E%3C/script%3E"));

It should now look like this:

var is_ssl = ("https:" == document.location.protocol);
var asset_host = is_ssl ? "https://static.punchtab.com/" : "http://static.punchtab.com/";
document.write(unescape("%3Cscript src='" + asset_host + "s/js/pt.js' type='text/javascript'%3E%3C/script%3E"));

The easiest and safest way to make this change is to log in to your PunchTab account and re-install your loyalty program. And don’t worry, the content (members, points, rewards) won’t be affected.

And if you’re a WordPress user, you can just download the latest version of the plugin. (That one is extra easy!)

Thanks for being a PunchTab user, and as always, we’d love to hear your feedback.

Comments: 39 Tags: customer loyalty, loyalty program, PunchTab

Announcing the PunchTab Activity Stream

Posted by robyn on September 23, 2011

We’ve got another new product!

You can now add the PunchTab Activity Stream to your loyalty rewards program. Let your users see what others are doing on your site to earn points. It’s an easy add, just head over to your dashboard to get to it!

Comments: 40 Tags: Activity Stream, customer loyalty, PunchTab, rewards program

We’ve made some updates to your PunchTab Sweepstakes for Facebook.

Posted by robyn on September 20, 2011

You know that nifty giveaway tab on your facebook page? We made look just a little bit cooler. Let us know your thoughts on our new Facebook fan page. (We’d love to hear from you!)

We’ve also added tabs to show off your PunchTab rewards leader-board and catalog. If you’re running a rewards program on your homepage and you’ve connected your Facebook fan page, you’re now showing off which customers are earning the most points and encourage others to get in the game!

If you haven’t started a rewards program on your home website, get to it. It’ll take you 3 minutes to set up and it’s free!

Comments: 32 Tags: Facebook, local, loyalty, PunchTab, small business, sweepstakes

NARM + PunchTab loyalty webinar

Posted by Ranjith Kumaran on August 11, 2011

We’ve been invited by the folks at NARM to show how PunchTab is helping build loyalty for their thousands of members tomorrow at 1pm PST.

What is NARM? NARM is the trade association for the business of music, providing the central platform for the discussion of industry-wide concerns and spearheading the implementation of initiatives to advance the business.

What will you learn? PunchTab will take you through a brief overview of what we do and the benefits of loyalty-enabling your website, business, or application complete with a full demo of implementing our services.

User the code webinar-100 to join for FREE: http://t.co/366HExC

Comments: 32