5 Ways to Increase Gift Card Sales This Holiday Season
As the holiday season approaches, gift cards are a proven way to boost revenue and leverage the incoming tide of shoppers bringing dreams, shopping lists, and money to retailers worldwide. Research has shown that 45 percent of holiday shoppers who redeem gift cards in stores and restaurants spend more than their gift cards’ face value. These tangible benefits, combined with advancements in gift card processing and technology, are fueling growing gift card adoption and year-over-year growth. The following five tips will help you increase gift card sales this holiday season and throughout the coming year.
1. Make Them Accessible and Easy to Buy
First and foremost, make your gift card offerings discoverable. Display stands strategically placed at checkout counters, and high-traffic areas of your store will help your customers find and buy gift card products; place banners and signs around the store to create a festive holiday atmosphere and make customers aware of your gift card offerings.
These days, gift card promotions are not limited to on-site locations. Omnichannel solutions will help you reach customers wherever they shop by promoting your gift cards across the internet, mobile web, social media, and third-party mobile apps, as well as in physical restaurants and stores. Promote gift card options on your website’s top navigation bar to further drive awareness and increase holiday gift card sales throughout the peak shopping season. In all cases, make your messaging fun, on-brand, and engaging for customers to navigate and explore.
2. Run Discounts and Promotions
It’s no secret that customers love discounts at all times of the year and holiday-themed discounts that offer the potential to stretch hard-earned dollars are especially popular. Use fear-of-missing-out (FOMO) marketing tactics to increase demand and reward customers for achieving spending milestones or upgrading orders. Motivate customers to level up holiday spending with incentives like “spend $50 and receive a $10 gift card” or “order a specialty pizza and receive a $15 gift card”.
If you’re looking for additional ways to inspire customers, leverage your POS customer management system (CRM) by viewing metrics from previous successful campaigns. Create personalized offers based on your customers’ unique profiles and data. Readily available templates in your point of sale system’s CRM make it easy to create discounts and promotions that appeal to your customer base.
3. Share it With Your Email List
Clever, impactful holiday promotions never go out of style, and your winning email blasts are no exception. If you’ve had a successful promotion in the past, why not make it a holiday tradition your customers will look forward to year after year? Your POS system’s customer marketing function can help you pull together transaction data, metrics, and messaging, to highlight key elements from your most successful and least successful holiday gift card email campaigns.
Leverage your POS system’s historical reporting and customer data to review past promotions and popular holiday gift card offerings. Drive engagement with well-timed email messaging. Reward loyal customers and newcomers who have recently patronized your restaurant, store, or website with holiday-themed messages and bonus offerings.
3. Run Retargeting Ads
Retargeting is a useful way to reach people who have visited your website, whether they have ordered food deliveries from your restaurant or browsed the menu on your site. A well-placed Google ad or a well-timed gift card promotion can boost brand visibility and welcome them back to take a second look.
Gift cards are frequently an impulse sale item, particularly for holiday shoppers looking for the perfect gift. Retarget website visitors and remind them that gift cards are a perfect last-minute gifting option that lets recipients make their own choices, and it’s not too late to purchase them. As part of your marketing mix, retargeting is a cost-effective customer acquisition tool.
4. Promote on Social Media
Today’s gift card products are customizable, and attractively designed holiday gift cards make a bold statement across digital media. Leverage social media platforms to showcase your restaurant gift offerings, including your fresh new line of holiday-themed gift cards. Make the most of your business social media account by showing not only gift cards but people’s reactions when receiving them and the world of possibilities these cards can unleash.
Use digital tools and graphics to create eye-catching designs and stage your gift cards in holiday settings. Create hashtags to promote your holiday gift cards and invite customers to join in on the fun by posting your hashtag on their own social media posts. Launch contests and promotions to reward customers who come up with the most innovative or fun posts about your gift cards.
5. Promote In-Person
This holiday season, make gift card sales an integral part of the customer experience by encouraging sales associates to show and sell holiday gift card offerings. Make it easy for employees who checkout customers wherever they eat or shop by making upsell, prompts part of the checkout stream on fixed POS terminals or mobile POS tablets. This simple addition will automate gift card add-on sales.
In addition to having employees talk about gift cards with customers, you can create a friendly competition to see which team member can sell the most gift cards this month and award gift cards as prizes to the winners.
Conclusion:
As this year’s holiday season approaches, holiday gift card sales can entice online and on-site shoppers to visit and increase spending at websites, restaurants, and stores. Growing adoption and advanced POS technologies have made holiday gift card sales, marketing, and management easier than ever before.
Join a growing number of eCommerce businesses, restaurants, and stores that are boosting sales and gaining customers by creating their own gift card programs directly from their POS systems, and discover what holiday gift card selling can do for your business.
