T-Mobile will pay up to $800 to help some customers leave another phone company. Think about the economics of that for a moment. A company that has never received a dollar from you may be willing to hand you hundreds simply for becoming its customer.
And T-Mobile isn’t alone. Banks offer cash for moving an account. Retailers reward customers for bringing in friends. Consumer brands issue rebates after purchases. Researchers pay people to spend an hour talking about products they already use. Loyalty programs give away points, products, and perks simply for coming back. These offers may look completely different, but they’re versions of the same transaction. Businesses are putting a price on what they want customers to do next. This isn’t a fringe concern, either. A Gallup survey reported this month found that access to customers was the factor most closely tied to how business owners feel about where they operate, named by 43% and ranking ahead of real estate costs and tax rates.
Your decision to switch has a price
T-Mobile’s Keep and Switch offer reimburses eligible customers up to $800 per line for the device balance they leave behind, to a maximum of four lines, provided the phone was on an installment plan with the old carrier for at least 90 days and at least three payments were made. Verizon has taken a different approach, offering $15 a month off every line you bring over from a list of qualifying carriers, mostly prepaid and smaller brands, with no end date for as long as the line stays active.
Why pay someone who isn’t even a customer yet? Because switching has a cost. A customer may still owe money on a phone, have several family lines to move, or simply decide that changing providers sounds like more trouble than it’s worth.
An incentive can make that friction disappear. And if the person who moves goes on to pay a monthly phone bill for several years, the new relationship can be worth considerably more than the amount spent winning it. One company pays it all at once. The other pays it out for as long as you stay. Both are buying the same thing.
There is an interesting detail in T-Mobile’s offer too. Qualifying reimbursements arrive as a virtual prepaid Mastercard, and T-Mobile’s own terms specify that the card has no cash access and expires in six months. The company is not handing over hundreds of dollars. It is handing over hundreds of dollars in a particular shape, which cannot be withdrawn, and which stops existing if you do not use it. That is why corporate prepaid cards, cash, gift cards, and rebates sit alongside traditional discounts in customer incentive programs. Sometimes a business wants another purchase. Sometimes it wants to transfer value to someone for taking a commercially valuable action. The form it chooses tells you which.
Your recommendation has a price too
What would you pay for a customer who brings you another customer? One unusually long-running study gives us a glimpse at the arithmetic.
Researchers from Goethe University Frankfurt and the University of Pennsylvania followed roughly 10,000 customers of a German bank. The bank offered existing customers 25 euros for each new customer they successfully referred. Six years later, the researchers found that referred customers were at least 16% more valuable than comparable customers acquired through other channels. They were also around 18% less likely to leave.
The figures aren’t a universal benchmark. It was one bank, in one market, using data collected between 2006 and 2008. The interesting part is the exchange. The bank had effectively put a 25 euro price on a successful introduction. Businesses already pay search engines, social platforms, affiliates, and sales teams to find customers. If an existing customer can produce the same result, rewarding them for it can simply be another form of acquisition spending.
That also explains why good referral programs reward the outcome rather than the gesture. Sharing a link isn’t particularly valuable. Bringing in someone who becomes a customer can be.
Even your opinion has a market value
Companies will also pay for something customers give away every day: what they think. Market researchers offer incentives for surveys, interviews, focus groups, and product testing because useful information requires people to give up time and attention.
Paying them can materially change participation. A meta-analysis of 46 randomized controlled trials involving 109,648 people across 14 countries found higher survey response rates when incentives were offered. Money was associated with 25% higher response rates, vouchers with 19%, and lotteries with 12%, compared with control groups.
Again, what matters is the value of the action. Clicking a satisfaction score takes seconds. Spending 45 minutes explaining why you stopped buying a product is something else entirely. If that conversation helps a company understand why thousands of customers are leaving, paying $25 or $50 for it can start to look inexpensive.
The same calculation follows you after the sale
Companies don’t stop putting a value on customer behavior once they’ve acquired you. They want another purchase. Another year. Another visit. Starbucks provides a sense of the scale involved. The company says Rewards members drove nearly 60% of US company-operated revenue in fiscal year 2025, and that it passed 35 million 90-day active members.
When Starbucks redesigned the program in January, it introduced membership levels and increasingly valuable benefits for more engaged customers. The company said it wanted to move away from a one-size-fits-some approach and concentrate its discount dollars on the benefits members actually value.
Strip away the stars, tiers, and free drinks and the underlying question is familiar. What customer behavior is valuable enough to pay for? For a wireless carrier, it might be switching. For a bank, moving an account. For a researcher, completing an interview. For a retailer, referring a friend. For Starbucks, coming back. Customer incentives aren’t just about loyalty. They can be used to influence behavior across almost the entire customer relationship.
Then comes the $25 problem
Suppose a business decides a particular action is worth $25. Now it has another problem: what should $25 look like? A discount encourages another purchase but requires the customer to spend again to receive the benefit. Cash is flexible. A prepaid card can be spent more broadly. A company’s own gift card keeps the value inside its business. A recipient-choice reward lets the customer decide where the value goes. There’s no universally right answer, because $25 isn’t equally useful in every form.
Give someone a $25 card for a restaurant they never visit and the business has technically delivered $25 of value, but the customer may not feel that it has. That has helped create another layer in the incentives economy: platforms designed to move value from businesses to customers without forcing every company to predict what every recipient wants. Giftogram, for example, lets a business choose the value of a reward while the recipient chooses from gift cards across more than 140,000 national and local brands, with no platform fees, sent one at a time or in bulk. The business decides what the action was worth. The customer decides where that value is useful.
One reward is a thank-you. Fifty thousand is infrastructure.
Sending one customer $25 is easy. Sending 50,000 customers $25 because each completed a qualifying action is an operations problem. Someone has to know who qualified, issue the correct amounts, and make sure rewards reach the right people. Failed deliveries have to be handled. And if customers are spread across different markets, the reward has to be useful where they actually live.
Do that manually and the administration around a small incentive can quickly cost more than the incentive itself. That’s why customer reward platforms increasingly sit behind the promotion the customer sees. A business might already know through its CRM that a referral converted, through its research software that a survey was completed, or through its commerce system that a purchase qualifies for a rebate. Platforms such as Giftogram can then handle the reward through bulk sending, integrations, or APIs.
The chain can become remarkably simple: Customer acts → business verifies it → reward goes out. At scale, that’s powerful. But it creates an important distinction: technology can automate how a customer is rewarded; it cannot decide whether the action was worth rewarding.
So what are you worth?
The next time a phone company offers hundreds of dollars to switch, the more interesting question isn’t why it is willing to give away so much money. It’s why getting you to switch is worth even more.
The same calculation sits behind the referral bonus, the research incentive, the rebate, and the loyalty reward. Each puts a visible price on something businesses have always competed for: what customers do next. It runs at every size. New business filings across the Finger Lakes rose 14% year on year, helped along by a buy-local habit that turns first-time customers into regulars. Every one of those owners is making the same judgment T-Mobile is making, with smaller numbers and sharper consequences.
Sometimes that price is $10. Sometimes it’s $800. Across millions of customers, it can become billions. The rewards themselves are becoming easier to send, personalize, and automate. The harder question—and the one that determines whether any of it makes commercial sense—is much older: What is the action worth?
Three questions this raises
How much should a business spend on rewards for marketing incentives?
Start with what the action is worth, not a round number. If a referral brings in a customer you would otherwise pay to acquire through advertising, compare the reward directly to that cost. If the action would have happened anyway, an incentive may simply pay for behavior you already had. Reward budgets should follow the value of the outcome, not the other way around.
What is the best way to pay out a customer rewards program?
Giftogram lets businesses send customer rewards individually, in bulk, or automatically through integrations and APIs. Businesses set the reward value, while recipients can choose gift cards from more than 140,000 national and local brands. It can be used for customer referrals, purchase incentives, rebates, research participation, and other programs where a business wants to reward a specific customer action
Why should businesses automate marketing incentive rewards?
Because the administration does not scale, but the reward does. Verifying who qualified, issuing the right amount, handling failed deliveries, and reporting on it all can cost more than the incentive at volume. Automating delivery through integrations or an API removes that overhead. It does not—and should not—remove the decision about whether the action deserved a reward in the first place.
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