Gift Card Program Best Practices

Launching Your Program

As with any other project inside you business, make sure to give enough time to launch your program. Physical production of the gift cards can take anywhere from four to eight weeks, and that is after the card designs have been approved. Additional time is needed if a point-of-sale integration is required for the gift card program.

To help smooth this timeline, make sure to have staff on the launch team that can make decisions about the direction of your program. Gift card programs often impact more than one group inside a company (marketing, operations, & finance are just a few of the teams that might be affected).

At this stage, you might also want to look at ways to reduce the cost of launching the program. An interesting example of this is co-branding your gift card program with one of your suppliers. One of our clients (a store that sold jeans), made an arrangement with Wrangler for some additional co-marketing dollars in exchange for the Wrangler logo being placed on the gift card alongside the merchant's logo.

Supporting Gift Cards as a Product

Having a launch team for your gift card product is important, but providing appropriate resources to ensure your program's continued development and success is also important. Gift cards are revenue generating products, so you should treat them as such. How do you staff your organization to handle existing products? Think about staffing your gift card program in a similar manner.

Marketing Your Program

By integrating the marketing and promotion of gift cards into your overall marketing plan, you stand an excellent chance of being very successful with your program. Consider your gift card program as an integral part of your brand image and one that is tied into your marketing. Use all your marketing channels to talk about and sell your gift cards: advertising, PR, promotional flyers, in-store signage, website purchasing, POS, and any others available to you.

Gift card program success can be enhanced by using existing advertising to alert customers that you have a gift card program. Take advantage of your current media buys for TV, radio, print and newspaper inserts by tagging the advertising with a "gift cards now available" message. Certain times of the year, such as "Back-to-School" and Christmas, may also be good opportunities to develop advertising entirely focused on gift cards as a product, as these are generally high purchase periods for gift cards.

Merchandising Your Cards

Many merchants have the same mindset with gift cards that they had with paper gift certificates. That is, gift cards should only be sold at displays by the cash-register or the point-of sale. However, by displaying cards at multiple places throughout your location(s), you can often achieve an exponential increase in your gift card sales. Remember, gift cards don't have any value until they are activated at the point-of-sale, so don't be afraid to merchandise them in places that you hadn't previously thought of.

Gift Cards can Market for You

A unique aspect of gift cards is that they can be an interactive marketing tool for you. Use this capability to drive return customers to your business through the use of coupons on gift card receipts, providing rewards for re-loading the card, or messages about exciting events at your locations.

Using the Web

• Strong promotion of gift cards on the site and information about purchasing cards.
• A customer self serve section that allows customers to check their card balance, recent transactions, or to register their gift card.
  • Letting customers register their card creates a replacement process if customers lose the card. This also gives you insight about your customers and, with opt-in permission, can also be used for targeted marketing.

Additional Sales Channels

For our Canadian clients, Giftcertificates.ca, a sister division in the Moneris family, is another opportunity for increasing sales. By offering your gift cards through Giftcertificates.ca, not only do you have an incremental sales channel for individual consumers, but you open up an opportunity to have your gift cards used as an incentive for many of Canada's largest corporations.

Also consider offering your gift cards for sale through other non-competing merchants. This introduces your business to getting customers that may not have traditionally come into your locations on their own. Taken to an extreme, you could also participate in on-line or off-line gift card malls, where multiple merchants have their gift cards or certificates available for sale.

Other Unique Uses

Promotions

• Using gift cards as prizes in contests.
• Send direct mail with pre-loaded gift cards in small dollar amounts to drive new customer traffic.
• Reward high-value customers by giving them a gift card with every purchase over a pre-defined dollar amount.
• Give a gift card after a pre-determined number of customers come through your store.
• Instead of using rebates, which is a discount, give a gift card so the customer comes back and spends more in your business.

Incentives
Gift cards are an excellent incentive tool, both for your own staff, as well as for other organizations. Offering your gift cards to other companies to use as incentives within their organization is an excellent way to increase your annual sales volume.

Refunds
Instead of providing cash back for refunds, consider loading the refund onto a gift card. This ensures that the customer comes back to your store to spend the value of the card.

Charitable Giving
Actively use gift cards as part of your charitable giving. Not only are you helping a worthy cause, you are gaining new customers for your business.

Trial is Important

Above all, the most important thing you can do for your gift card program is to plan a trial period for your program launch, and for any changes you make to your program. By using a few locations where the Manager has bought into the idea of gift cards and their capabilities, you can work through any bugs in your plans. By trialing gift cards for refund tools, using unique promotions, or different display options at selected locations, you can better understand what works for your business.

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