How to Ensure Your Marketing Is Driving Incremental Sales

Not all sales are created equal.

If you’re running marketing campaigns with offers, discounts, or cashback incentives, it’s natural to assume every redemption is a win. But how many of those customers were going to purchase anyway? And how many were actually influenced by your campaign?

This is the difference between just driving sales and driving incremental sales — that is, sales you wouldn’t have made without the marketing activity. And if you’re not measuring incrementality, you’re flying blind.

The Pitfall of Passive Incentives

Let’s say you’re running a cashback offer. A customer shops as usual, makes a purchase, and later discovers they earned cashback. It’s a nice surprise — a feel-good moment. But did that cashback drive the sale? Probably not.

This is a classic case of rewarding behaviour that was going to happen anyway. In this scenario, your marketing budget is subsidising existing customers rather than influencing new behaviour.

It feels good, but it’s not good business.

Activation is Key to Measuring Impact

One simple but powerful way to improve incrementality is through activation mechanisms — like an “Activate Offer” button.

When a customer actively taps or clicks to engage with an offer before making a purchase, they’re raising their hand. It becomes much easier to attribute the sale to that specific campaign. You know the incentive played a role in their decision — and you’re no longer guessing.

This creates a clear distinction between:

• Redemptions – passive rewards after the fact
• Activations – engaged responses before the purchase

That shift gives you cleaner data, sharper insights, and a much stronger sense of ROI.

Other Ways to Measure Incrementality

Activation isn’t the only tool in your kit. You can also:

• Use control groups to compare results against a baseline
• Run time-bound offers to track uplift during specific windows
• Deploy geo-targeted tests to isolate campaign effects by region
• Use exclusive redemption tools — such as Simpal, where offers are only accessed via a promotional payment card

At Linked Loyalty, we’ve built these principles into the design of our platform. Every campaign on Simpal can be structured with activations, tracking, and audience segmentation baked in — so you can be confident your incentives are doing more than just pleasing customers. They’re moving the needle.

Final Thoughts

Incrementality isn’t just a marketing metric — it’s a mindset. It pushes teams to focus not just on activity, but on outcomes.

So next time you launch an offer, ask yourself:

Is this driving new behaviour, or just rewarding the old?

That one question could change the way you think about marketing ROI.

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