The vast majority of consumers hold to the traditional folk wisdom that if a deal looks too good to be true, it probably is.  If they don’t discount it immediately as some sort of scam, they are at least deeply suspicious, wary of requirements, conditions, and loopholes.  That want to know “what’s the catch?”

Unfortunately, free rebate certificate promotions fall into this “too good to be true” category.  If you tell a potential customer that, for example, if they buy a car you’ll give them a certificate for $500 worth of free gas, they are instantly suspicious and on their guard.  Many will ask you what the catch is.  Consequently, if you use free gas and grocery promotions (we offer six categories plus a Combo), you have to know them backwards and forwards. You need to be able to explain to a customer, on a moment’s notice, exactly how the gas and grocery certificates work so thoroughly that they have no doubts left that the offer is indeed legitimate.  To help you in that, this article will explain in detail just exactly how free gas and grocery promotions work. 

First, you (the store owner) purchase a number of these free certificates from a redemption company.  You buy them at a greatly discounted rate, paying “pennies on the dollar”.  You then use these certificates as an incentive to get customers to buy your product or service.

The best analogy that you can use to explain the process to your customer are the mail-in rebates for items at electronics stores like Best Buy.  The customer pays full price for the item, mails in the rebate receipt, and within a few weeks the company mail back a check for the rebate amount.

To use free gas and grocery promotions, the customer must: (for this article I’m referring to Gas and Grocery but we have six categories available – Gas, Grocery, Dining, Pharmacy, Pet and Retail

1. Choose a gas station (for gas certificates) or grocery store (for grocery certificates) that they want to use their certificate with.  They can choose any store they want, but then must always use the same store for the entire certificate redemption period.

2. Activate the free gas or grocery certificate, and state which store they plan to use it at.  They can ONLY do this online.
(Your customer must have access to a computer)

3. The redemption company provides the customer a redemption coupon that is printable from the registration site (much like a mail-in rebate form) with the customer’s name, activation number, and month & year the coupon needs to be sent in on.

4. On the first day of the next month, the customer begins saving receipts of their gas and/or grocery purchases. 

5. At the end of the month, the customer mails in the redemption coupon for that month and their receipts to the redemption company. Receipts must be entered by the end of the month and mailed before the 15th of following month – see “Terms and Conditions” on actual certificates. 

6. If their receipts show they have spent at LEAST $100 on gas or groceries that month at the store they previously selected, the redemption company will mail the customer a $20 VISA gift card or make a “Direct Deposit” on their Visa card which the customer may use anywhere. ( or Option B – 24 hour turn around after approval of physical receipts)

7. They continue this process until the certificate amount is used up.  For example, if they received a certificate for $100 in free gas, they can get $20 in free gas once a month for five months.  If they get a certificate for $500 in free gas, they can get a gift card for $20 worth of gas once a month for 25 months ($20 per month x 25 months = $500.00).

That’s how it works.  The customer does have a few hoops to jump through, and a deadline each month, but nothing unreasonable.  If you explain this clearly enough to them, hopefully they’ll become convinced that your free gas or grocery promotion is legitimate.  That builds customer trust—something worth its weight in gold in a competitive marketplace.

The following is a “Industry Specific” slideshow presentation on HOW the actual system works.
This presentation is for the “Home Security” industry.
http://incentivesgroceryandgas.com/slideshow/security/starrebates

Only the Best,

Michael Goulet – TL
Direct Strategies, Inc.
“The Incentive Pros!”
http://incentivesgroceryandgas.com
http://www.incentivebasedpromotions.com/    (Star Rebates)

Another testimonial from a satisfied business owner.

April 19, 2010

Dear Mr. Pouls:

We have a successful furniture business in Waite Park, Minnesota. We researched Star Rebates and contacted some companies that have done business with you. We learned that Star Rebates has a stellar reputation and that you have had no problems.

The Star Rebates program is simple and is set up to help the customers avoid mistakes, such as sending in the wrong receipts. Our customers are receiving their rebates via gift cards and direct credit to their Visa cards. We have had several customers comment on how much they like the program, and we have even had previous certificate holders return to make additional purchases!

We definitely are pleased with the promotional value of this program, and our customers have expressed their appreciation to us. We will continue to take advantage of this program – it has been a great resource!

Star Rebates is doing a fantastic job in providing our customers with very efficient and timely service. Please feel free to contact me if you have any questions regarding this program. Thank you Star Rebates!

Sincerely,
Phil Loch and Dale Dirkes

Here is and industry specific presentation just created for the Home Security Business. Will have more presentations soon covering multiple industries.

Check how our Rebate Certificate can be used in your business.

http://incentivesgroceryandgas.com/slideshow/security/starrebates

Our Introduction Presentation

Free nights in a top hotel. Free airfare. A free ocean cruise. A free Caribbean vacation. If you told your customers that you would give them their choice of one of these free travel offers – would that help you close a sale?

For just pennies on the dollar, you can give your customers one of these free travel offers for just making a purchase, renewing their membership, referring a friend, or joining or your mailing list. How about enticing your customers to make a larger purchase by giving them not just one, but twenty of the most popular vacation destinations, which have been jammed-packed in our Lifetime Travel Book. An incredible $15,000 in value!

Or if you prefer, we’ll customize a travel offer just for you!

LifeTime Travel Book:

The LifeTime Travel Book is truly an amazing product. It is made up of 20 of the most popular travel offers. These travel offers never expire so the customer can take a trip every year for the rest of their life and never have to worry about the trips not being valid or the fees going up.

To redeem, the customer simply goes to www.LifeTimeTravelBook.com. Once on the site, they click the button called “Click Here To Register Now.” They will then enter their serial number and click “Continue.” From here, all they have to do is choose the travel offer they are interested in and then proceed to redeem that offer.

Please note that the Travel Incentive Program is built on upgrades. So in some instances, a customer may only pay taxes or boarding fees or some registration fees which is far cheaper then getting the whole trip and paying for it. But the company makes its money by booking each reservation over the phone and trying to then upgrade the customer from a two night stay to a four night stay or from an inside cruise cabin to a cabin with a view, from coach airfare to business class or from a standard vacation from one that includes car rentals, excursions, etc.

To learn about our travel partner please visit www.ClaimYourFunPlanetVacations.com and click on the testimonial button. There you will find 20 or so testimonials regarding the company and their travel program.

Travel has been around forever but there has never been a LifeTime Travel Book. The travel company, is really a travel agency that redeems the products in the LifeTime Travel book. An amazing statistic is that only 3% of the travel offers are redeemed exactly as offered. The other 97% choose some form of an upgrade – and that is how a travel company makes its money.

In the very near future our LifeTime Travel Book will be offered as a Fundraising opportunity for Non-Profits.

Only the Best,

Michael Goulet – Team Leader
Direct Strategies, Inc. – “The Incentive Pros!”
http://incentivesgroceryandgas.com
michaelg@freegrocerycenters.com

Related articles by Zemanta

• Marketing Assets (tlmarketing.net)

Gas and grocery promotions ( also Merchandise and Pharmacy available April 1, 2009)—offering certificates for free gas or groceries to encourage customers to make purchases—has the potential to drastically improve your business, sales, and profits. Note that we only said “potential”. Like any other sales campaign, if you don’t do free gas and grocery promotions just right, you’ll only get mediocre results—or possibly no results at all. This article will give you some hints and tips on how to get the most out of free gas and grocery promotions.

ADVERTISE, ADVERTISE, ADVERTISE

First and most importantly, you HAVE to advertise a free gas and grocery promotion as much as possible. The purpose of free gas and grocery promotions is to get customers into your store who wouldn’t normally come, and to make purchases they wouldn’t otherwise make. If you DON’T advertise the free gas and grocery promotion adequately, what you’ll get instead are people who come to your store planning to make a purchase anyway, and consider the free gas or grocery certificates a pleasant, but unexpected, surprise bonus.

There are many ways to advertise. Blast emails are probably the cheapest. A direct mail campaign to a targeted audience is also effective. Finally, spend the money to place an advertisement where it will reach a large general audience, like an ad in the local newspaper or a commercial during the local news. The goal is to make as many people as possible aware of your free gas and grocery promotion.

BIG DEAL

You also have to make the deal sufficiently sensationalistic to turn heads. If, for example, you only offer a certificate for $50 worth of free gas if a customer makes a $1000 purchase, that’s not going to encourage very many people to come into your store. In general, the closer the values of the purchase and the free gas and grocery certificate are, the more people will respond. That same $50 free gas certificate, if offered in exchange for a $100 purchase, will generate more interest. A $500 free grocery certificate in exchange for a $1000 purchase will have the same effect. The ultimate is to offer a certificate equal to the amount of the purchase—for example, a $300 free gas certificate for a $300 purchase—because customers will see that as “free money”, and consider themselves fools not to take you up on the offer.

MEDIA MATTERS

If your free gas and grocery is sufficiently sensationalistic (such as in the last example mentioned above), it might generate enough interest to be newsworthy. Contact your local newspaper and television news program, and let them know about your sale. There’s always the chance they’ll have a slow news day, and decide to run an article or news report on your free gas or grocery promotion. This is essentially fantastic, free advertising. Even if your local media declines to do a spot on your promotion, you haven’t really lost anything—it takes almost no time or money to have made a phone call or mailed a letter.

FOLLOWUP AND FEEBBACK

Finally, make it as easy as possible for customers to collect on their free gas and grocery certificates. Your free gas and grocery campaign can backfire if the first round of certificate holders grumble to their friends that your promotion wasn’t all it was cracked up to be—or even a scam. That’s the kind of free advertising you DON’T want.

Instead, explain the redemption process to your customers in detail. Provide them with written instructions. Finally, purchase your free gas and grocery certificates from a redemption company that makes it simple and easy for certificate holders to get their free gas or groceries, with a minimum of conditions, restrictions, deadlines, or hoops for the customer to jump through.

Michael Goulet
Free Fuel Nationwide Team Leader
http://incentivesgroceryandgas.com
w-612-377-5262
Fax-480-304-9095
michaelg@freegrocerycenters.com

HOW FREE GAS AND GROCERY PROMOTIONS WORK

The vast majority of consumers hold to the traditional folk wisdom that if a deal looks too good to be true, it probably is. If they don’t discount it immediately as some sort of scam, they are at least deeply suspicious, wary of requirements, conditions, and loopholes. That want to know “what’s the catch?”

Unfortunately, free gas and grocery promotions fall into this “too good to be true” category. If you tell a potential customer that, for example, if they buy a car you’ll give them a certificate for $500 worth of free gas, they are instantly suspicious and on their guard. Many will ask you what the catch is. Consequently, if you use free gas and grocery promotions, you have to know them backwards and forwards. You need to be able to explain to a customer, on a moment’s notice, exactly how the gas and grocery certificates work so thoroughly that they have no doubts left that the offer is indeed legitimate. To help you in that, this article will explain in detail just exactly how free gas and grocery promotions work.

First, you (the store owner) purchase a number of these free gas and/or grocery certificates from a redemption company. You buy them at a greatly discounted rate, paying “pennies on the dollar”. You then use these certificates as an incentive to get customers to buy your product or service.

The best analogy that you can use to explain the process to your customer are the mail-in rebates for items at electronics stores like Best Buy. The customer pays full price for the item, mails in the rebate receipt, and within a few weeks the company mail back a check for the rebate amount.

To use free gas and grocery promotions, the customer must:

1. Choose a gas station (for gas certificates) or grocery store (for grocery certificates) that they want to use their certificate with. They can choose any store they want, but then must always use the same store for the entire certificate redemption period.

2. Activate the free gas or grocery certificate, and state which store they plan to use it at. They can do this either online or through the mail.

3. The redemption company provides the customer a redemption coupon that is printable from the registration site (much like a mail-in rebate form) with the customer’s name, activation number, and month & year the coupon needs to be sent in on.

4. On the first day of the next month, the customer begins saving receipts of their gas and/or grocery purchases.

5. At the end of the month, the customer mails in the redemption coupon for that month and their receipts to the redemption company.

6. If their receipts show they have spent at LEAST $100 on gas or groceries that month at the store they previously selected, the redemption company will mail the customer a $25 VISA gift card which the customer may use anywhere.

7. They continue this process until the certificate amount is used up. For example, if they received a certificate for $100 in free gas, they can get $25 in free gas once a month for four months. If they get a certificate for $500 in free gas, they can get a gift card for $25 worth of gas once a month for 20 months ($25 per month x 20 months = $500.00).

That’s how it works. The customer does have a few hoops to jump through, and a deadline each month, but nothing unreasonable. If you explain this clearly enough to them, hopefully they’ll become convinced that your free gas or grocery promotion is legitimate. That builds customer trust—something worth its weight in gold in a competitive marketplace.

Michael Goulet
Free Fuel Nationwide Team Leader
http://incentivesgroceryandgas.com
w-612-235-6372
Fax-480-304-9095
michaelg@freegrocerycenters.com

Do you want to attract new customers to your business? Have you tried the traditional methods of flyers and newspaper advertisements? While these may be somewhat effective, what if you could find a way to get new customers to come to you by spending pennies on the dollar? With the struggling economy, everyone is trying to find a way to get new customers generated, while retaining the customers they have. We have a solution the will use the bad economy to get new customers!

Everyone has to do two things that can’t be avoided. They must put the nozzle in the tank, and food on the table. Use the increasing cost of groceries and fuel to get new customers and reward the customers you have – and keep them coming back! How do you do this? With our program, you offer them an incentive that no one can refuse, and one that will benefit 100% of your customers. Have you found a program that will appeal to 100% of the population yet? We have the answer.

Rebate Certificates reward consumers for being loyal customers of their favorite grocery store, gas station, retail/department store, pharmacy, spa, movie theatre, restaurant or sporting event. That’s eight different categories which, in exchange for submitting their monthly receipts, customers get $100, $300, or $500 in Visa cards as a “thank you” for being a loyal customer!

Offer your customers an incentive program that will give them a gas or grocery certificate, just for spending money with your company. With our certificates, you purchase them for literally pennies on the dollar and offer them to your customers. With this program, you can see an increase in sales of up to 30%. And on top of this, it is guaranteed to work! Just consider the results others have seen:

One car dealership purchased 700 gas certificates as an incentive to test drive vehicles. In a direct mail advertisement combined with a simple newspaper ad, and the dealership had people lined up to test drive vehicles. This has worked so well, this dealership now orders more than 5,000 per month.

You aren’t limited to industry specific businesses. ANYONE can use these certificates as an incentive, including retail locations, banks, contractors, home sales, real estate, churches, medical offices, and more. There is no limit to this.

Purchase these certificates with our current introductory offer is twenty- five certificates. Please contact us for more information on pricing. Can you imagine this kind of traffic to your business and how this will excite your employees? If you don’t see an increase in your business, we will buy back your unused certificates. So contact us to provide your customers with a great product from you and an incentive to go with it.

If you have not received our price list you can OptIn on this site and it will be forwarded.

Please visit my site and review our FAQ for additional details.

Michael Goulet – Team Leader
Direct Strategies, Inc. – “The Incentive Pros!”
http://incentivesgroceryandgas.com
http://incentivebasedpromotions.com/ (Product Site)
http://fundraisingandincentives.com/ (Non-Profit Certificates)
http://fundraisingandtravel.com/ (Non-Profit TravelBook)
w-612-377-5262
Fax-480-304-9095
michaelg@freegrocerycenters.com