If you don’t offer gift cards to your eCommerce store’s customers, you are in the wrong. Ask any experienced business owner and they will be singing paeans about the effectiveness of gift cards to their bottom line. 33% of people spend more on gift cards than any other gifts. You can safely invest in physical and online gift cards for your brand since we know now that customers prefer using them as gifts.

Benefits of using gift cards

• They can increase your sales and the size of the order value
• It opens you up to a new set of customers since gift card recipients aren’t usually from your target market
• Gift cards increase cash flow since customers pay in advance before the product or service is delivered to them
• It encourages impulse buys since the gift card has been already paid for
• You get access to information about the sales since it offers real-time tracking, reporting, and an analytics dashboard
• Since gift card recipients choose their own gifts, the chances of returns are incredibly lower
• Gift cards act as one more sales channel for your retail store
• It allows you to track who redeems the gift card, therefore helping reduce fraud
• It makes your customers feel connected with your brand since physical gift cards act as souvenirs

5 creative ways to promote gift cards

Make them omnipresent

Yes, one of the easiest ways to make sure that everyone knows about the presence of gift cards in your business is to make it brazenly visible in customer touchpoints. Apart from creating a special landing page for it, make sure that your customers are informed about it everywhere else too. Email marketing, in-app messages, kiosks, home page, etc., are places where you must advertise them.

If you could slip in a line or two about your gift cards in customer communications, that is brilliant. Don’t be shy about it. Do remember that you are offering something of value to them. There is no need for you to be coy about it.

Use multiple marketing channels

List down the number of marketing channels that you currently use. The next step is to incorporate them into your marketing efforts. You can leverage your social media handles and create giveaways. Giveaways can drive engagement by more than 70%. Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat are where you will find most of your audience lurking, especially if you cater to the B2C segment. Plan ahead to promote gift cards on social media the right way. Create a content calendar where you make it a point to mention gift cards in the communications, to increase awareness.

Email marketing campaigns are also a sure-shot way to up the sales of your gift cards. In fact, emails can be used to nurture customers and increase their understanding of how gift cards can benefit them. You must remember that the campaigns for each marketing channel should be in line with the best practices that must be followed. Make sure the content is relevant, engaging, and personalized to the end user.

No matter which channels you use, remember that the final experience should be seamless.

Come up with interesting designs

Your gift cards can be an incredible marketing asset. It works like magic, especially if you offer physical gift cards. How? By creating gift card designs that stand out. The gift cards should be personalized and create an impression at first glance.

Here are a few ways you can create interesting designs

• Add as many brand identity elements as possible. Choose colors that reflect what your brand stands for
• Customize gift cards for each season. This is one plan of action that you must implement as this can help you capture more holiday customers
• Luxurious packaging is another way to pique customers’ curiosity
• The design should be so good that it should make potential customers who don’t have it, crave it. Imagine if you could create a gift card design so iconic that people want to have it for themselves. That’s what you should strive for
• Some visual humor is also great to capture the attention of your target audience

Keep experimenting

The gift card strategy that works perfectly well for your closest competitor might turn out to be a damp squib for you. To get the best out of gift cards, you need to keep experimenting with different strategies.

Include special offers for your gift cards

Gift cards, by themselves, are an attractive proposition for customers. But you need to up the ante by making it irresistible for them. You can sell more gift cards and increase customer engagement by giving them the right offers.

Here are a few ways to make gift cards more special than it already is:

• When the value of the gift card crosses a particular threshold, offer extra value to it. For example, if a customer purchases a gift card for $100, add an additional $10 to the same card or a different one that the one who buys it gets
• Instead of giving refunds in cash, let the customer know that if they collect the returns in the form of gift cards, they get 10% more value than the refund amount
• Offer gift cards on discounts to increase the usage of gift cards
• Instead of discounts on products, offer the discount value as gift cards
• Customers who purchase from you on special days such as festivals can be given a free gift card with a reasonable amount added to it
• Use gift cards to appease disgruntled customers. By doing so, you will get one more chance to offer them an excellent experience

Measuring gift card campaign success

It is imperative that you measure the success of your gift card campaign so that you know if there is an improvement or not.

• Gift cards sold via each channel
• The amount redeemed from each gift card
• The channels that give the most ROI in terms of gift card purchases
• Information about the customers
• Product categories that are bought the most by gift card recipients
• Time taken to redeem the gift cards
• The average percentage value of each transaction from gift cards

Ensure that you keep measuring the numbers and benchmark them against the previous year’s campaign.

Wrapping up

Gift cards are game-changers for retailers. eCommerce and brick-and-mortar retailers who get their gift card strategy right will see a lot of ROI from it. Give your audience a gift card with fantastic offers and a design experience that makes them proud and excited to have it for themselves or give it away as gifts to loved ones.

If you are looking to arm your store with gift cards, the 99minds team would be thrilled to help you with us. Get in touch with us and we will walk you through how you can set up gift cards for your business. Embrace gift cards to increase customer loyalty and most importantly, your bottom line.