A Brief Look at the Bing Rewards Program

I recently received an email from Bing, because I’m an XBox Live subscriber, to earn 2,000 Xbox Live Reward Credits. Now I know we don’t normally talk gaming on our articles here but hear me out with what I realized when I read into this Bing Rewards campaign. One thing that immediately popped up though was how ironically identical the Bing Rewards logo was to the Google Drive logo. It’s not a direct copy but see for yourself:

Bing Rewards is what I’d like to call an underhanded tactic to boost traffic to their search engine by enticing rewards and a point system to users. Let’s start with the email introduction.

So as you can see, if you’re an avid gamer, you can receive more points to your profile by using their search service on a regular basis. Seems innocent enough at jump, but lets see more.

By logging into the dashboard on a daily and weekly basis you’ll find different tasks or suggestions for places to visit and actions to perform to gain points. I have to give credit because they understand gamification well enough to place status levels for frequent users of the Rewards program. By being active you can earn things daily and even earn rewards for a charity if you don’t want to splurge on yourself.

They also got social too. Sign in to Facebook through on of their Dashboard links and allow Bing to access your public profile and friends. Here’s the message I got when I declined the approval:

“Please try connecting again to complete this offer.

To help Bing find friends who know something about your searches, all Facebook permissions need to be selected. You’re always in control – you won’t post anything automatically.”

And lastly, the affiliates and stores who have already lined up to coerce you to shop and by from them. The more effort you put into the program, the more credits you will earn and you can cash those in for discounts and deals. One way to look at this would be if you could offer you own customers some type of loyalty points for using your products or sharing your services. Especially if it is something they use frequently.

The bottom line is Bing is seeking to boost their search traffic and brand awareness. Sure they can continue to try and do it organically by just offering a better option than Google, but while that’s not working, they’re going to try and appease to their loyal customer base instead. And as a business owner, you may want to look at this marketing plan and see how if you can replicate it somehow for your own services. We all understand that our best customers are the ones we already have, so if we can turn them into super fans in a means that doesn’t sell out or annoy, we should see some success.

Featured Image credit: audioundwerbung / 123RF Stock Photo