DnD4: Rewarding players without XP

Last night my D&D players had quite the triumph - they flat-out defeated a large number of monsters in an encounter I'd designed to be a chase.

This was partly because the events of the story took a slightly unexpected turn, and the encounter happened on a platform jutting out over a long drop, rather than the corridor I'd originally planned. The players capitalised and pitched most of the non-minion mobs over the edge in short order.

I don't want to change the XP award for the encounter (which was a standard level 6 encounter, not inflated for the large number of mobs); they ended up taking about the same number of turns and expended the same amount of resources as they would have by escaping. It doesn't feel like they've got any further ahead on the learning curve than I would have expected.

But they did do something cool, and they deserve some bennies for it. Here's what I'm thinking of going with, which essentially describes how I like to reward players above and beyond giving them XP:

1. Early access to magic item loot. I wouldn't want to give out extra items (affecting long term balance), but getting an item earlier greatly impacts the short term, and means a little bit more total value from the item over its lifespan. I'll shift up a treasure parcel or two; it makes sense, they held ground I expected them to abandon, so they can have leisure to find some stuff there. In a D&D context getting gold early is unlikely to be as useful, it doesn't have much application until downtime.

2. Information/Plot. Increase the fiction-layer power of the PCs without increasing their mechanical power <3. This already came into play in this case - they held their ground, and thus could interrogate a dying foe. A related reward would be to give the party even more of what they wanted out of a conflict - increase the setting impact of their victory.

3. Improved NPC reactions. In this case, all their future opponents for this adventure will be further down the cavern, and thus probably saw kobolds hurtling down to their doom. Should be good for intimidation purposes :) Giving extra spotlight time to particular characters is also a good reward of this type, but it's not really possible to give extra time to the whole party, so we'll have the NPCs be even more impressed.