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Choose rewards for a campaign

Pick incentives that move your customers to act — without inviting the kind of gaming that quietly drains a reward pool.

This page is about strategy, not mechanics. The how — attaching incentives, ranking them, pausing them — lives in Add and rank incentives. Here we cover how to decide which rewards belong in a campaign in the first place, so the campaign you build actually shifts behaviour.

Fewer, stronger rewards​

It's tempting to offer a long menu of perks and let customers pick. In practice a short list converts better: one to three rewards is the sweet spot. A single, obviously valuable reward is easy to understand and easy to say yes to. A wall of options creates decision fatigue and dilutes the one reward that would have closed the action on its own.

If you're unsure, start with one reward that clearly outweighs the effort you're asking for, and add a second only if it serves a genuinely different customer.

Match perceived value to the effort you're asking for​

Every campaign trades a reward for an action. The reward has to feel worth the friction of the action:

  • Low-friction actions — opening an account, subscribing to updates — pair well with modest, universally useful perks. The reward's job is to nudge, not to bribe.
  • High-friction actions — making a first purchase, upgrading a plan, completing onboarding — justify a stronger, more specific reward. If the action is real work, a token reward reads as an insult and depresses conversion.

The completedJourneyValue you set on the campaign (see Create a Boost campaign) is your own estimate of what the action is worth to you. Use it as a sanity check: if the reward costs more than the action earns you, the campaign math doesn't work regardless of how well it converts.

Know which rewards can be gamed — and control for it​

Not all rewards carry the same abuse risk, and the riskier ones need guardrails before you hand them out at scale.

  • Automatically-applied and static-code perks are low-risk: the same offer is available to everyone, so there's nothing to hoard.
  • Single-use coupon codes are handed out one per customer journey and are finite — a pool can be emptied. Watch pool health and be ready to swap in a replacement so a campaign never shows an exhausted reward. See Coupon and swap it in the app before the campaign shows a dead offer.
  • Gift cards carry real stored value, which makes them the most attractive target for abuse. Reserve them for actions you can verify and for audiences you can trust, and gate them behind the controls Paylode gives you — including restricting where reward requests can come from (see Restrict access by IP).

The rule of thumb: the more a reward is worth in the open market, the more certain you should be that the customer really completed the action before the reward is delivered.

Keep the list fresh​

A reward that's expired or out of stock is worse than no reward — it makes the campaign look broken. Perks have lifespans, and coupon pools deplete. Build a habit of checking for soon-to-expire rewards and replacing them before they go dark; the campaign list in the app flags campaigns whose perks expire soon them.