Gift cards are an excellent way to build customer loyalty for your business. They make for great last-minute gift-givers during the holiday season and can improve your customer retention rate. They also help drive people to make larger, higher-margin purchases that maybe they’ve been holding off on buying.
If you’re on the fence about whether you should implement gift cards into your marketing strategy, here are some of the ways you can utilize gift cards to help benefit and grow your business.
Offer discounts with gift cards
You can create incentives for buying gift cards by offering in-store or online discounts when they are used. For example, using a gift card in-store will get you 20% off your order. It’s a good idea to offer a higher discount for in-store purchases, in order to get more people through the door rather than shopping online.
Besides offering a discount, you can offer other rewards such as a small gift with purchase or loyalty points if you have integrated a loyalty program. A loyalty program is a program designed to reward customers for their continuous support and can include gift cards.
This will help build customer retention as they will be more likely to continue shopping at your business and purchasing gift cards for themselves and their friends and family due to all the added benefits.
Gift cards for customer birthdays
Customers loved being appreciated, especially by their favourite stores. It’s always a great feeling when someone remembers your name, your order, or can recommend something you may like. The same goes when it is your birthday, and there’s nothing better than getting a reward from a store for just being born.
Sephora is a great example of this. They have a loyalty program called Beauty Insider which offers many rewards and benefits for their shoppers. One perk is a free birthday gift where you can choose a small gift usually containing 2-4 mini-size beauty items. You can do this by offering your customers a gift card on their birthday.
It doesn’t just have to be a customer’s birthday for you to offer a reward in the form of a gift card, you can also reward their loyalty to your business. Many membership-based businesses will offer discounts on customers’ 2nd, 3rd, 4th, etc. year of membership, making the discount greater each year. If you know a customer that has been coming to your shop for years, you can simply reward them with a gift card. That’s why we love gift cards, they are so versatile!
Reward your employees with gift cards
Just as it is important to reward loyal customers, you can’t forget the efforts of your employees. A great way to give back to your dedicated staff is with gift cards.
Giving your employees a gift will help boost morale and create a caring and supportive work culture. You can offer your employees gift cards for their hard work, in celebration of a holiday, their birthday, as a sales incentive, or even hold a friendly competition amongst staff.
Employees that feel appreciated for their work are more likely to enjoy their job and be better at their work, therefore increasing your employee retention rate. A high employee turnover can affect your sales and will increase time spent on employee hiring and training.
Improve your customer service with gift cards
Providing high-quality and efficient customer service is crucial for every business. Poor customer service will reflect badly on your business and can result in bad reviews, loss of customers and negative word of mouth.
No customer wants to feel as though they are not being heard and if you provide excellent customer service, they will continue shopping at your business.
If you encounter a dissatisfied customer who wants to return their purchase, you can either give them a refund or offer them a gift card. By offering a gift card, you have the ability to retain them as a customer even if they had a less than ideal experience.
Social media giveaways
Collaborating with other businesses is a tactical marketing strategy, it will help your brand reach a different and perhaps larger audience and increase your customer base.
Social media is an instrumental marketing tool used by businesses of all sizes and an often strategy is to hold a giveaway. A giveaway is exactly what it sounds like, for example, a business will share a post informing their followers that they are giving away a basket of their products, and customers can enter the giveaway by sharing, liking or commenting and tagging their friends on the social media post. The post will then circulate to many people and a winner is chosen at random.
You can also collaborate with other businesses that would complement your own, for example, if you are a yoga studio doing a giveaway, perhaps you could partner with a skincare brand. This will make the giveaway even bigger and reach more people.
A great gift to include in a giveaway or just on its own is a gift card. It enables people to choose whatever they’d like from your business and more often than not, they spend more than the gift card is worth.
Push people to buy items left in the cart
Have you ever added items to your cart and taken a look at the total price and quickly close your search browser? We’ve all been there, and your customers have too. But imagine getting an email from that store with a $10 gift card, that might just change your mind about the total and give you the incentive to make the purchase.
Gift cards can help drive people to purchase the items waiting in their cart as well as encourage higher spending.
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