Incentives: Gift Certificates or Cash?

[Boricua]

I'm building a site that will offer incentives when a user signs up for an incentive-friendly affiliate offer. My original plan was to offer gift certificates as the incentive. However, I've started to wonder if I should just offer a cash incentive instead.

My fear with the gift certificate approach is that it could be a bear to manage. If the site is successful, it could take a lot of time to order and send gift certificates (which would likely be a mix of paper and electronic gift certificates). OTOH, with a cash-based approach, I could use a third-party check writing service. All I would need to do is prepare and upload a file to the third-party service. They would take care of printing and mailing checks. It seems so much easier to manage.

Does anyone have an opinion on what I should do? I'm particularly interested in your perspective on how site visitors would be respond. Would they be more likely or less likely to respond to incentivized offers if the incentive is a check rather than a gift certificate? I spoke to one person who thought a gift certificate incentive was likely to stand up as being more credible by site visitors. Do you agree or disagree?

[Giles]

I don't think I would actually believe I would recieve a check, or that the check would actually work. If you offer goods or gift certificates people are much more likely to see it as reliable.

[etech-martin]

I agree, a gift certificate incentive is likely to stand up as being more credible by site visitors, the visitors are more likely to trust and see you as reliable if you offer gift certificate rather than a check. I would suggest you to go for the gift certificate approach even though it will be a little inconvenient for you.

[Boricua]

Thanks Giles and etech for your responses.

I'll probably end up going with the original idea (gift certificates). Even so, I wonder if there's anything I could do to overcome the credibility issues associated with checks. Do you think testimonials and/or an image of a sample check would be enough to sway people?

What if I offered 3 simple options? For example:

- A Check
- A PayPal transfer
- An Amazon gift certificate

Do you think the availability of additional options would make it more likely that visitors would trust the check option?

[Emancipator]

amazon gift certificate is best.

[Cutter]

How do you plan on getting people to the site? Is it part of an existing site, or are you going to have to promote it through advertising? This will play a big part in credibility. I'm working on an incentivized site right now. I'm having trouble just getting people to the site, let alone getting them to complete offers.

[Boricua]

I'm setting up a new site. I hope to drive traffic to the new site from a handful of other sites I run.

What ad network are you using? I'll be using Azoogle. So far my attempts at running non-incentivized Azoogle offers have gone nowhere. I'm hoping that an incentive might lead to some conversions.

If I can demonstrate that the new site converts at a reasonable rate, I'll probably explore other traffic generation options.