If you are spending $100,000, $200,000 or more on gift cards for your company’s marketing and sales campaigns, you are in good company. The Incentive Gift Card Council (IGCC) sponsored a study by the Incentive Research Foundation (IRF) that showed customer and channel audiences have the largest budgets of gift card spending: $490,000 average annual budgets for customer programs at large companies and $360,000 average annual budgets for channel programs at medium-sized companies.
The reasons for this popularity are that 82 percent of surveyed consumers would prefer a gift card over other options like checks or merchandise. For the most impactful programs, you want to use what motivates your audience. In addition, gift cards are cost-effective for you to fulfill — especially digital gift cards.
Sales and marketing leaders want solutions that easily deliver appealing gift card choices inspiring their target audience to take the desired action. They want flexible ordering options, reporting, fulfillment options, recipient customer support and a reduction in the hassles of obtaining gift card merchant brand approvals, sourcing physical and digital gift cards and tracking lost orders. These important elements of any program create extra work and cost your team precious time. This is where gift card suppliers can really provide innovative solutions.
There’s another part of the IRF study that’s worth noting. In large firms, participant communication — including website, mobile app, email, etc. — were outsourced to gift card suppliers. Suppliers have resources to aggregate multiple gift card brands and provide reporting, multiple ordering options, fulfillment and customer service support where retail locations or gift card websites do not. This is where a gift card voucher solution can offer great value, but it’s not often the first thing people think of when they’re looking for gift cards.
First, a quick definition: a gift card voucher can be a physical or digital card, a token or a code that is given to recipients that allows them to select what type of gift card they want from a group of brands, i.e., a code good for a $50 gift card from one of 150 gift card brands. This product supports the communication to convey appreciation and reinforce the branding strongly desired by those using gift cards.
Here are a few ideas on how to work with a gift card supplier of vouchers or codes to offer a selection of appealing gift cards in sales and marketing programs that deliver effective program tools with attractive financial models.
A medical manufacturer offers consumer incentives through their health care partners.
A desire to reduce poor recipient experience issues with an expiring prepaid card and provide stronger support online and over the phone for the incentive recipients were main goals. A custom physical gift card voucher allowed them to offer a wide selection of merchants that fit the target audience in their marketing campaigns. The gift card supplier created and mailed the vouchers to a client-supplied list of qualifying participants and managed the online redemption website and phone support, removing the administrative burden from the client. As a percent of the total budget, costs above the face value of the gift card were less than 8 percent to create and send the physical vouchers, host the redemption site, provide phone support and fulfill with physical or digital gift cards of the recipient’s choice.
A national organization incents consumers to make donations.
Goals included increasing donor engagement and conversions, streamlining gift card merchant brand approvals and maximizing their budgets. The gift card supplier created a solution that provided communication of appreciation to all qualifying recipients and a way to claim their reward by a certain date. This allowed the client to only pay for rewards that were used (i.e., take advantage of breakage) and created a validation process. This process reduced direct program costs by as much as 30 percent while increasing donor recognition by 50 percent. In addition, brand approvals for marketing campaigns are now managed by the gift card supplier, saving the client time. A permission-based campaign management portal provided by the gift card supplier allows the client to create their own marketing campaigns, set a budget, establish start and end dates for the claim codes to be valid, and upload a recipient list to retrieve a file of claim codes that can be sent digitally or physically to their qualifying recipients. The gift card supplier hosts the branded claim website for the client where the claim code and validation information are captured, giving the recipient access to select the gift card of their choice.
A marketing agency client rewards channel partners with gift cards.
For continuity of program theming and communication, the marketing agency wanted to remain in charge of the client’s reward experience. The gift card supplier created secure codes for the marketing agency to include with recipient communication. Upon completing qualifying actions of the incentive program, recipients had hundreds of gift card options to choose from and the gift card supplier handled all gift card redemption orders, fulfillment and recipient customer support.
The above solutions can be applied to a variety of channel and consumer programs to support administration and reduce time and cost. Visit go.gcincentives.com/salesandmarketing.com to download GC’s Incentive Guide for more ideas.
Sources:
A Closer Look at Gift Cards: U.S. Spend, Support, Sourcing, and Services for Gift Card Programs in Corporate organizations, The Incentive Gift Card Council and The Incentive Research Foundation, March 2018
Next-Generation Promotions, research study conducted by Aberdeen Group on behalf of Hawk Incentives, 2018
2018 State of Consumer Gift Card Preferences, Blackhawk Network, March 2018
