Gift Cards: your tool to fight the retail financial crisis

We have been hearing many news about how COVID-19 has changed the financial background in Europe, the unluckiest ones have even experienced it on their skin. In the business framework surely the most affected sectors have been travel, hospitality, restaurants and traditional retails.

The companies that have financially survived are now trying to find new sources of income, often by either diversifying their sales offer with news products, services or by testing new marketing strategies.

The first choice is rather an expensive path that comes with the desperate need of quickly acquiring new competences to integrate and manage a new business unit. On the other hand, the second option is surely safer, cheaper, and often more effective.

In the giant pool of marketing, between waves of creativity and slaps of reality, there is a reliable sales and marketing tool: Gift Cards.

Gift Cards have been discovered more and more in the last years, not only by private users but also by companies. In fact, gift cards are an easy-to-use branded payment method, that can be carried either in the pocket or on the phone, ensuring nevertheless great KPIs.

You might ask yourself: “Ok, should I build up a Gift Card program for my company, either investing my internal IT resources or by purchasing a ready software by one of the leading companies on the market?”

Surely, Gift Cards do bring you new natural sales when being sold in store and on the e-commerce to private users. However, to really exploit the marketing potential of gift cards you should invest in self-promotion!

Let me give you more details.

When you decide to integrate Gift Cards promotions into your customer journey to achieve specific marketing objectives, the results are guaranteed.

Let’s say you want to make your customers more loyal and ensure that they come back in the short term. Offering a discounted Gift Card with a limited validity, not only will provide you with straight-away cash, without having the costs yet of the sold product/service, but it will also ensure that the customers owning Gift Cards will come back to your store before their gift cards’ expiration date.

Another opportunity to get similar actions is implementing new customer acquisition targets, by activating a member-get-member campaign or a welcome gift, when reaching a certain basket value.

Moreover, great results can be reached with reactivation campaigns.

Did you know that Gift Cards have a +25% of reactivation rate, compared to the traditional discount vouchers? Thanks to Gift Cards a classical reactivation DEM to your client’s database can be a great success.

And this is just a bite of the huge possibilities of Gift Cards as marketing and sales tool!

Article by Francesca Raimo, International Merchant Service Director at Amilon