Marketing With GiftCard Pro

Promotional Ideas:

Offer your customers a cash-back discount if they spend a certain dollar amount today. Load the cash-back value on the gift card to drive future purchases and maintain the full revenue amount from the original sale.

Target special promotions to your cardholders to encourage business during your slow times.

Load cards with a small dollar value and distribute them as "electronic coupons" at a special event.

Use the gift cards as a customer service tool for returns or dissatisfied customers. By offering the customer a gift card with loaded value, you often turn the situation around, plus you maintain the revenue from the original sale.

Provide an incentive for employees to encourage Gift Card sales such as a bonus for hitting a certain target or contest prizes.

Consider this...

Gift Cards are not just for the holiday's it a year round marketing opportunity to build business and gain customer loyalty.

Gift card sales will hit an estimated $17.34 billion during the 2004 November-December holiday season, up from $100 Million the previous season.
National Retail Federation

74% of consumers surveyed said they planned to buy gift cards during the 2004 holidays.
National Retail Federation

Raising customer retention rates by 5% could increase value (profits) by 25% to 100%.
Bain & Company

The average gift card purchaser planned to buy more than 3 cards and spend about $108.28 during the 2004 holiday season.
National Retail Federation

More than half of all consumers- 50.2 % in an earlier survey said they would like to receive gift cards as a holiday gift, up from nearly 10% from just two years prior.

National Retail Federation

It costs as much as six to ten times more to acquire a new customer than to maintain an existing one.
Wall Street Journal

Retailers Perspective:

Gift cards are attractive to retailers for a number of reasons. First and foremost, research shows that a large percentage of consumers spend more than the original face value of their gift card. Many consumers spend nearly twice as much.

These cards often represent a nice little reservoir of funds to the gift recipient, allowing the consumer to purchase something nicer than they might otherwise have done.

Gift cards have no value until loaded at the cash desk. As a result, they can be prominently displayed throughout the store, rather than stored in a drawer for security reasons, like their predecessor, the gift certificate.

For both consumers and retailers, gift cards are not the drab gift certificates of old. They are particularly attractive to younger recipients, due to their similarity in appearance to credit cards, and to older recipients who "have everything".

They are also much harder to counterfeit. They are more flexible than gift certificates because they can be loaded for any amount the purchaser desires and many of them can be reloaded.

Many retailers are using the cards as a marketing tool, producing them in bright colours, with their logos and a variety of eye-catching designs. They can also build store-loyalty; drawing in recipients who might not have frequented a particular retailer in the past.

Because the cards are electronic, the retailer can better track their use, providing another source of data on their customers' purchasing habits.

In addition, a further side-benefit to the retailer (or card management company) is that a certain percentage of gift cards are never redeemed, in full or in part. Even where cards are ultimately redeemed, a certain percentage remains outstanding at all times, giving the business a fund to invest in the meantime.

Gift cards give the recipient the freedom to choose a gift they really want, and they are an easy solution for those with limited time to struggle over determining and purchasing the right gift for the "hard to buy for" or other recipients.

Further, the use of gift cards can reduce the number of unwanted gifts that are returned, a plus for retailers and consumers alike.