Despite the Coronavirus and the lockdown, the gift card industry is expected to grow to $2.7 trillion by 2027. The US accounts for more than 26.9% of the global gift card market size as of now. It is a testament to the fact that gift cards will always be in high demand. Retailers who provide gift cards to their customers certainly have the upper hand. It increases their brand value as well as gives a fillip to the business’s credibility.
Here are a few tactics on how you can elevate your gift card marketing strategy for the year 2021:
1. Create an irresistible offer:
If you want to attract many customers to buy your gift cards, make it look extremely lucrative in their eyes. Gift cards are a great way to convince your customers to keep coming to your store again. But to make customers buy them in the first place involves much more effort than that.
It would help if you found innovative ways to capture the attention of your target audience. Since customers are bombarded with discounts and offers everywhere they go, they will be tuned to ignore your efforts to sell it to them. The business needs to come up with an irresistible offer that will persuade the customer to buy the gift card without batting an eyelid.
2. Add them as a part of your promotions:
While you can have offers on top of your gift cards to increase your gift cards’ sales, you can even include them in your promotional efforts. For every customer who purchases above a particular amount, you can offer them a gift card. With this strategy, you can get them to shop with you again, and if they gift it to their loved ones, you will be telling a “Hello” to a new customer as well.
3. Keep it on display:
If the POS terminal is the only place where you prominently display your gift cards, then you are doing it all wrong. Talk about the gift cards in your social media handles. Sponsor the posts that talk about gift cards. Attract more customers to buy gift cards by using them as a selling point. Whether you sell online or in a physical store, let the customer see the gift cards at multiple places. Do ensure that there is a balance so that your potential audience don’t feel as if you are spamming.
4. Incentivize your employees to sell more gift cards:
You know the multiple benefits that a gift card offers for your business. Starting from putting you in front of new customers to giving you cash up front, the advantages are endless. But what’s in it there for your employee to push the selling of more gift cards? Nothing. By providing an incentive for your employees to sell more gift cards, you will be increasing its sales. It is a win-win for everybody involved.
Use gift cards themselves as an incentive for your employees when they do excellent work. They will also get to try out your products, and it is an excellent way to say thank you for the services rendered. Once they get a feel of the product, they will be in much better shape to sell your business to potential customers.
5. Use them for customer returns:
Here is another interesting way for you to market your gift cards. Product returns are a hassle, but instead of giving them rebates in cash, you can send money back to the customer in the form of a gift card. But there’s a caveat, though- customers will not usually prefer to have their money back in gift cards; they’d rather have the cash. At this juncture, you need to sweeten the deal by adding a little extra cash on to the gift card than what they had paid for. Now, that’s an incentive for the customer to at least think about getting their rebate in the form of a gift card.
6. Show reviews and testimonials:
Your customers are going to be skeptical when you shove a gift card in front of them. No one likes being sold to. Unless the customer understands the value of the gift card, they are going to be hesitant about it. It is a different scenario when someone is purchasing a gift card to present it to their friends. But if you are looking to go a step ahead and push gift cards, then you have to be more engineering than just saying that you offer gift cards.
Show your customers that there are hundreds who will vouch for the benefits that your gift card offers. Only when they see other customers who are similar like themselves will they be able to trust you more. You will appear credible in front of them.
7. Incentivize gift card purchases:
What do you think will happen when your customers get to know that buying through gift cards offers them more benefits than using money? Of course, it will result in more people buying gift cards. While that can be construed as a little extreme, there are other ways you can incentivize gift card purchases.
8 Use gift cards as an incentive:
Let’s say a customer refers a friend of hers to your business; you can offer the referrer a gift card of a small value as a token of appreciation. You can also offer gift cards for purchases that happen over a certain period of time. Customers can accrue points for doing things like downloading your app, rating your app, signing up to be an email subscriber, etc., which can be later redeemed in the form of a gift card that they can purchase items with. It is also one way to make your customer keep buying from you.
Conclusion:
Gift cards are a smart way to make more upfront money, bring in new customers, increase your brand value, appear like a professional business, and so on. If a business doesn’t find it important enough to use gift cards to boost their sales, then it is a tragic waste of resources. There is so much that can happen for your business if you use your gift cards wisely.
The year 2021 will bring about a lot of changes in the way customers behave. Gift cards don’t seem like something whose value will diminish any time soon. If you are looking for help with setting up a gift card program for your e-commerce business, we are more than happy to hop on a call and show you how we can help you.
