If you are into retail, now is the time for you to up your gift card game. Businesses need to change their mindset when it comes to gift cards, it is usually considered as a part of a marketing exercise. Gift cards can be much more than that, it should be part of your customer service function too.

With Covid happening, there will be a lot of changes in the shopping habits of consumers. The number of people lining up in front of stores to buy from their favorite brands might not happen anytime soon. People are happy shopping online and digital gifting is inevitably the best option for businesses to spread cheer, at least a bit.

Let us understand the gift card buying behaviour of customers from Incomm’s Consumer Pulse Gift Cards report:

Based on this study, it says that 37% of shoppers purchased gift cards online. The number is only going to increase with a reduction in shoppers visiting physical stores. They would rather buy the gift cards online and send it to their family and friends who they are buying it for. Without a doubt, even the recipient of the gift card will be happy to purchase something based on the gift card value, that too online than venturing into a physical store.

The average gift card buyer usually purchases 4.2 cards per quarter. 86% of these gift card purchases were usually pre-planned. In more than 67% of the times, these gift cards were purchased for family members. Among these pre-planned purchases, more than 66% of it were in-store purchases.

A marketer needs to understand that most of the gift cards that are bought for friends and family are a planned activity. Based on this information, marketers can create campaigns and convert customers into gift card buyers.

If it is a closed loop purchase, then more than 81% of it was pre-planned. These shoppers purchased 3.4 cards per quarter based on reports from the Incomm study. For the uninitiated, closed loop gift card would be a single purpose card using which you can only buy from a single company.

Open loop gift card buyers plan more than 90% of their purchases well in advance and are also known to buy more than 4.8 cards on an average. An open loop card can be used anywhere where that brand of card is accepted.

The study has revealed that when parents offer gift cards to their children, it is usually to help them pay for something they need.

Conclusion:

You realize that most of the gift-card buying behaviour revolves around making their friends and family feel valued and loved. That’s the crux of the entire study, if we could think in that perspective. The next step that a retailer needs to do is create a fantastic customer experience roadmap along with the help of a gift card software that makes the buying process easy. 99minds can help you with the gift card while the retailer should spend time on coming up with brilliant offers for the gift card buyer.