Incentives are a relatively inexpensive way to establish customer relationships, boost sales, and increase loyalty. It is the creative use of free or low-cost give-away promotions by businesses to produce leads, increase sales and generate repeat business. Offering a promotional incentive closes sales and builds customer loyalty, as well as increases leads and prospects.

Popular promotions that fill the bill are tried and true tools as include sweepstakes, games, and contests. These promotions must also fulfill a decidedly modern requirement: building a customer database to serve the next target marketing effort. Not only do they get sales up fast, but they also enable companies to create customer databases easily and inexpensively. After years of talking about one-to-one marketing, marketers at last are capable of establishing relationships with their customers.

New technology today is allowing the marketer to collect customer names, addresses, e-mail, likes, dislikes, interests, and other information that enables them to target their offerings with greater accuracy. A prime reason for the resurgence in consumer promotions is that advances in technology have led to a solid decrease in overall costs and a greatly improved return on investment.

One of the methods of incentive promotion is debit card promotions. These are turnkey, easy to manage, and highly motivating. Participants accumulate points that can be redeemed for an award. The debit card is co-branded both with the program theme and the sponsoring company's logo.

Another method is incentive travel. The primary objective of "incentive travel" may be to increase sales volume. Or it may be to improve morale and good will, introduce new products, move full line or slow items, offset competition, bolster a slow season, build dealer traffic, prepare for strong season, or support consumer promotion. Incentive travel is one part of a broad range of marketing tactics used to achieve various goals. Travel incentives work much like advertising to reinforce a company's image with salespeople, trade partners, and consumers. Any travel program is the direct reflection of the company's quality standards.

Although the destinations have changed dramatically since 9/11, travel is still a popular consumer incentive. People are more concerned about safety, so there has been a definite shift in where people want to travel.

Marketers using travel in, say, a sweepstakes promotion will increase participation by keeping that thought in mind. After all, he says, people are unlikely to try to win a trip to an exotic destination if they are unwilling to travel outside the country.

Smaller companies move toward implementing online games and sweepstakes due to closed-ended budgets. Larger companies develop overall umbrella programs and budget for longer-term loyalty campaigns.

In all one has to remember that effective incentives and promotions must do more than create a great look. The designs must be functional and meet the marketer¡¯s goals. One should concentrate on creating visually captivating communications that work for marketer, its customers, its sales force, and its distributors.