Gift card system for small business

What should you look for in a gift card system for small business?

First, let's define the question, what is a gift card?

A gift card is a cash-based token to be used at a specific retail or online location. As the name implies it's usually given as a gift. Growing in popularity, gift cards are the most wanted gifts during the holiday season (National Retail Federation (NRF) survey).

The gift card industry is one of the most lucrative retail markets. With the international gift card market hitting sales of $318 billion USD in 2017.  This number is projected to rise to almost $506 billion USD by 2025.

The transformation of the gift card into experiences

The gift card, sometimes referred to as a gift certificate for North American market or gift voucher in the UK, is transforming and expanding into the experience and service markets.

Growing in popularity is the desire for experiential gift cards. While still relatively new to the North American market, many early adopters are cashing in and offering gift cards for their experiences.

In the UK, experiential gift vouchers (as they are referred to) are already in popular demand. This trend is continuing to surge.

With the move towards digital commerce in the gift card industry, it is likely that plastic card will be redundant as more shoppers are preferring the idea of having an e-card on their mobile device instead. Especially among millennials.

Throughout this post we will be referring to gift cards and gift experiences as ‘cards’ or ‘gift cards’.

So why should you adopt a gift card software for small business?

A great way to make additional revenue and maximise your sales is to offer gift cards for your services!

Here’s the potential

One of our clients The Celtic Manor Resort has grown gift card sales to $2.9 million per year!

How?

One of the fascinating facts about experiential gift cards is that once purchased, many of them go unredeemed. Meaning, you never actually spend on the service cost of the card.

This means you get to pocket ALL the revenue from the sale.

A great example is one of my own, a few years ago I received a restaurant gift card as a wedding gift, I still haven’t got around to spending it.

It’s not that I am not interested in the gift, the restaurant is one of my favourites. I just haven’t got around to booking my reservation yet. Now it’s most probably invalid!

This is what you’ll find with a portion of your gift card sales too.

Your cards will be bought as thoughtful gifts to someone special. Sometimes the receiver will book right away and become loyal visitors of yours, and sometimes they may forget to use the card altogether like me. This is where you still win- as the sale is done, but you’ll never fork out the service cost of that card.

So, whatever your services, it makes sense to promote and sell them in the form of a gift card. Just so you can capture that extra revenue.

Managing your gift cards

As you grow and progress you’ll need a useful strategy in place to manage your gift cards properly.

Things to consider for gift card management

  1. Storing gift card details
  2. Tracking analytics for increasing sales and accounting
  3. Managing the expiry life of a gift card
  4. Marketing gift cards properly
  5. Presentation of gift cards
  6. Add-ons for gift cards
  7. A system to sell the gift cards (online and on location)
  8. Having a 3-month extension card
  9. Well-designed gift card platform
  10. Shopping enhancing features

Storing gift card details

In time you’ll need a useful system where the details of purchased gift cards are stored.

The best way to do this would be to have a digital management system. A great system will allow you to manage and process your cards simply and effectively.

You’ll need a system that can do the following:

Managing life expectancy of a gift card

According to The Credit Card Accountability Responsibility and Disclosure (CARD) Act of 2009, gift cards cannot expire within a 5 year period from the date they were activated. The US federal law has given a floor for regulation which can be subject to individual state regulation. However, this regulation is subject only to monetary gift cards.

That means you can put an expiry date on your gift experiences as there is a transaction of service and not monetary value.

By putting an expiry date on your card for your experiences, you can get control over your card and services. This is important as you don’t want someone turning up to your business with a 5-year-old card, for a service you don’t offer anymore.

As mentioned above, you’ll also want an effective way to redeem used cards. This is to stop fraudulent copies of cards being made and used repeatedly. Now if you really want to take it up a notch, using a digital system to redeem cards also will allow you to track your card analytics. You’ll get to see;

  1. How many cards don’t get redeemed.
  2. Which are the most popular- so you can keep selling these.
  3. Which cards may not be selling at all- so you can better invest money and time on promoting other more popular cards.

With this tracked information, you can make effective marketing decisions based on analytics and improve your future sales.

Marketing your gift cards properly

To really take your sales to the next level, the marketing of your gift cards will play a huge part in the process.

Marketing your cards is such a HUGE process, there are many things to think about. Because of this, we have split up our marketing of cards into separate posts, where you can read in more detail.

Marketing your gift card in-house is a great way to get visitors to be aware.

There are so many events throughout the year that you’ll want to capitalise on and ensure you maximise your gift card sales.

You’ll want to promote your gift cards digitally too. As this section is so detailed we’ve got another blog post, dedicated just to the digital marketing of gift cards.

Add-ons for gift cards

Whatever your product or service you are gifting, you can create extra revenue from it by having add-ons with your card.

What is an add-on?

It’s something complimentary to your product or service that customers can buy additionally with their gift card, to enhance the experience making it extra special and personalised.

For example, let’s take a spa experience gift card. You could have the option to ‘add-on’ a glass of Champagne or chocolate covered strawberries to really make the experience worthwhile.

The add-on option gives the buyer an opportunity to make their gift extra special.

 

Gift card system for small business

To truly make the most money from your gift cards, you will really need to have them available online.

You may have loyal customers that travel from across the country to experience your offerings. They may want to buy a gift card for a family member or friend, so make this process easier for them by offering the cards on your website.

You’ll need a system in place that can process online payments and transactions effectively. Plus, the purchasing of the card online needs to be simple and easy to use. Just like a familiar shopping online experience.

Make sure your gift cards are easy to find on your website with clever website design, this is crucial!

 

Delivery of gift cards

With the popularity of e-commerce and trust among shoppers, more and more are preferring to use electronic tracking of gift cards over a physical card.

That’s why with our system, we also send the gift card details via email.

For the shoppers that still like a physical copy. We offer an easy to download printable PDF of the gift card.

All in all, you want the purchasing of your cards to be an extremely easy process. Complicated and difficult shopping experiences will almost always make customers give up the process and abandon their purchase.

 

Having a 3-month extension card

For those who forget to spend their card within the expiry period, it’s a great idea to have an option for them to purchase an extension card. 3 months in which to spend it is usually a reasonable amount of time.

These are very popular and provide a solution to those who really do want to use their card without paying the full cost of another.

The extension cards must be priced properly. Not more than the price of the original card, but enough so that you make a decent amount of extra revenue from them.

 

Gift card platform design

You also want your gift card website to be attractive, but also fit with the design of your own brand.

It also needs to work easily and effectively so that your customers can navigate around the page.

It must be easy to use on the back-of-house end for you and your staff too. You’ll need an easy and simple way to retrieve the information you’re looking for.

Take a look at the features of our gift voucher system to get a more in-depth idea of what may be important to your business.

Your gift card platform will also need to be mobile compatible too!

Shopping enhancing features

This will include things like making multiple orders. A protected payment process for security. Adding promotional codes to allow the ability to process high volume orders in a single day (important for days like Black Friday!)

You’ll also want the ability to add promotional codes to some cards if you are doing a short-term promotion.

Start using gift card software for small business today!

Seeing the benefits of gifting your services and products yet? There’s a lot of potential extra revenue to be made in the gift card market. Make sure you jump on board and sell your cards the proper way.

Contact us at Enjovia where we can help facilitate and support all your gift card and marketing requirements.

Sell MORE with your Valentines Day gift vouchers

In this post, we will demonstrate how you can increase sales with your Valentines Day gift vouchers.

Valentine’s Day is one of the major gift-giving events of the year with more than 1 Billion being spent on loved ones in just the UK alone. In the US, a whopping $27 billion is spent on Valentine’s Day gifts!

What we found most interesting about the recent study taken by MuchNeeded was that 'gift experiences' are wanted by a huge 40% of people!

It's clear that experiences are more and more desirable to consumers. So don't get left in the lurch. If you haven't yet set up a gift voucher store then you need to do so fast!

Valentine's Day campaign ideas

No doubt you’ll be selling gift vouchers for this special occasion, so here are 5 simple steps you can maximise your revenue and sell more gift vouchers this Valentine's Day.

 1. Create Bespoke Valentines Day Gift Voucher Packages

Valentine’s Day is where loving gestures is the name of the game. It’s important that you provide bespoke and unique gift voucher experiences to create a feeling of exclusivity for a special experience.

Here’s the fun bit! Whatever your industry, you can easily create unique gift experiences by simply adding extra items as part of a voucher package.

For example, a spa can add chocolate-dipped strawberries and champagne to a treatment. A hotel can include rose petals on the bed and complimentary chocolates in the room. A restaurant can include a free bottle of wine with Dinner.

Whatever you choose to put together, just make sure it’s unique and exclusive for Valentine’s Day.

It may be worth working together with local attractions, vineyards, restaurants or experiences to widen your offering. It will show that you can provide the very best service to your customers and that you are aware that there are some things you just can’t or don’t do, however, that won’t detract from their great day!

 2. Who’s the voucher for?

Valentine’s day can be a bittersweet day for some. Particularly for singles, romance is everywhere in sight. That’s why you can use some clever marketing at this time and create packages not just for couples but single people too.

1 in 4 people buy Valentine's day gift for their pets! 

valentine's day gift vouchers

Without any presents to buy, singles will have more disposable income. You'll be missing a trick by not including everyone in this Valentine's promotion.

Some ideas to target singles for Valentine’s Day:

Now let’s not forget that Valentine’s Day is primarily for people in Love. That could be for the beginning of something special, or even that reminder for couples that have been married for years. It’s important to create packages that reflect the different stages of people’s relationships and that all-important gesture of love.

3. Images and Wording for your Valentines day gift vouchers

Use high quality and original images for your Valentine’s Day Vouchers. The best kind of images is of people immersed in the experience. This way people can imagine themselves (or their intended) using the voucher. Check out our post on how images are best used for Marketing here.

Use clever wording to capture your buyer’s attention. Think about words that evoke a feeling, or something they can relate to. Think about the different kinds of people buying your experiences.

For the buyer that has no idea:

 “Haven’t planned Valentine’s Day?… Let us help!”

For the buyer who knows what they want:

“Make Valentine’s Day gift truly special…”

“Make her feel special this Valentine’s Day…”

 

For the long-term married buyer:

 “Rekindle the Romance with …”

And for singles:

 “Show that special person you care”

 “The Single Friends Spa Package”

“Why should couples get all the fun?”  

 

4. Website Promotion

Maximise your sales by promoting your offerings through all available online and offline channels. This can be through a physical display of products at key point of sale areas or online through your social media or an email campaign.

Read more about the in-house promotion here.

For your online vouchers, there’s a cleverer way you can get attention to them.

  1. Landing Page

Dedicate a Valentine’s Day gift landing page exclusively for your gift experiences.

Make sure the link to this page is featured right on your homepage! It’s also a good idea to add many internal links for the most visibility.

  1. Catalogue Category

Create a Category to promote and group your Valentine’s Day Offers within your voucher browsing page. Then position it to number 1 in the catalogue order on the gift voucher page.

 

  1. Personalisation

Create add-ons for your vouchers. Customers wanting to construct their experience themselves can make a truly personalised and thoughtful gift to suit their valentine.

You provide a fully personalised experience while boosting your revenue simultaneously. Win=Win.

The type of add-ons available could be an additional spa treatment, maybe a bottle of wine or even some rose petals, couples love that stuff!

Emotional purchases certainly drive up revenue on Valentine’s day.

5. The Final Push

For those last-minute buyers, (which from our Valentine’s Day figures show there are many!), ease their pain by highlighting a last-minute deal or by simply promoting a ‘Last Chance’ for vouchers to be delivered for valentine’s day.

Do this by sending out a last-minute email campaign on the day before and the day of Valentine’s Day. You’ll be surprised how many sales come through on this day.

The ease of online shopping for Valentines Day gift with an instant email confirmation-  it will look like the voucher was planned all along!

For more information on how you can improve your valentines day gift vouchers, contact enjovia.com.

Christmas business promotion ideas

Are you looking for competitive Christmas business promotion ideas?

With the ongoing threats of lockdowns and closures, experts are forecasting online sales skyrocket by around £5.6bn according to Internetretailing.net. With so many people expected to stay at home this holiday season, the increase in online spending comes as no surprise.

But for retailers like yourself, this does mean a more competitive online market. In this blog post, we are going over Christmas business promotion ideas to make you stand out from the crowd!

Let’s get started!

Christmas Business promotion ideas:

1.  Who are you targeting?

With each of your Christmas promotions, you need to be specific in targeting a certain buyer. This is so that your audience will feel compelled to purchase what you’re selling as you’ll be directly solving a problem that feels personal to them.

You want your customers who see your ad to feel like you’re not only talking directly to them, but you understand their needs and wants too.

Ask yourself, What are their needs?

For example, let’s take restaurants targeting home food deliveries for the Christmas period.

Their customers either desire a hassle-free meal without all the fuss of cooking themselves, they could be poor cooks, or they quite simply want to treat themselves and the family to a restaurant-quality meal- without risking being in public places.

Any messaging like these examples in their promotions will certainly attract buyers. People are drawn to experiences that fit within their lifestyle. Promoting opportunities that give people solutions to their problems will guarantee you more sales than a mere generalized holiday promotion.

2.  Be Merry with Christmas themed designs!

Christmas CTA’s (Call to Action Buttons)

When your customers see your updated website with Christmas themed designs it subconsciously communicates that not only are you current, but there are Christmas offers to be had!

Introduce a Christmas themed banner on your homepage that clicks-through to your specific Christmas sales page. This creates an improved user experience as the customer has less actions to take to get to their desired page.

As we all know, fewer clicks to checkout= higher sales made!

Pymnts.com found that a huge 40% of online sales are abandoned due to frustration with websites that make you take too many clicks until checkout!

Do the same with email signatures or Call-to-Action links. Do this by adding at least one link in your email marketing campaign that takes customers directly through to your Christmas offers.

3.  Give the gift of Christmas

Build on your customer relationships by giving this Christmas. There are many ways to ‘give back’ with Christmas promotions.

Some examples include:

  1. Enter your customers into prize draws with substantial prizes to be won! For example, our clients Welsh Rarebits have a fantastic Christmas promotion this year where upon purchase of a gift voucher you'll be entered into a prize draw to win a £100 Welsh Rarebits voucher.Welsh Rarebits gift voucher promotion
  2. Give away little extras that are valuable to your customers in the checkout.

Customers are all looking for advantages they can gain out of their Christmas shopping experiences. Giving a little back could make all the difference between choosing between you and a competitor.

4. For services - be giftable!

For all businesses who operate through services, you need to switch up your promotions and sell gift experiences.

Too many times we see hotels and restaurants on social media promoting their room rates, spa days, restaurant meals with the link going through to direct bookings either through the website or to a phone line.

Sending a link directly to your gift voucher page has two advantages.

  1. Customers can purchase the voucher right away and they can think about a time that suits them best when to use it or gift it to someone for Christmas.
  2. It eliminates customer decision delay. When needing to book deals directly, customers need to check the availability of their party, times etc.

Selling the same option available in gift voucher form encourages spontaneous buying as people don’t need to make a decision on any of these things yet.

If you’re stuck for ideas on which services or products you can promote in gift vouchers, don’t worry, as we’ve written a blog post on this exact topic which you can read here: What are the best gift cards to give for Christmas?

5. Create promotions to create a feeling of togetherness.

The year 2020 has been a challenging year. With the global pandemic still lingering, fear and isolation is still a residing reality for many.

This year, promote ‘togetherness’ in a way to unite people. Whether that’s providing opportunities for your customers to donate to charitable organisations, working with local businesses or even providing opportunities for your customers to have memorable experiences with their loved ones.

In your promotions use wording that communicates care, love, sharing.

Create packages that give families opportunities to make beloved memories and to focus on what matters most- even in such an unexpected year.

6. Solve holiday headaches!

Christmas is a wonderful time of year- but it also comes with its headaches!

If you can provide solutions to common holiday problems, you could be onto a winner.

Offer a gift wrapping service with your sales or a dinner delivery experience as we mentioned above.

Think outside of the box for unique experiences that would make your Christmas easy. If you can provide effective  Christmas solutions, people will be driven towards your offerings.

7. Maximise website and social media visits with holiday-specific keywords

Keep up with trending keywords by finding out what customers are searching for this Christmas.

Use tools such as Keywords Everywhere which provides keyword trends commonly asked questions on search engines, and related searches to give you great ideas on what people are looking for this Christmas.

Choose to use keywords that have high searches across search engines and social media, and be sure to include these in your product descriptions, social media posts and even blog posts to increase web traffic.

Keywords everywhere example

8. It doesn’t end on Christmas!

We see thousands of gift voucher sales go through on Christmas day itself!

So it’s important to recognize that not only are people still shopping on Christmas day, but also all the way through until the New year.

Quite often, customers will hold off purchasing gifts until the after-Christmas Boxing day sales.

Strategise your promotions so that customers who missed out on your holiday sales can still get a slice of the pie in the after-sales.

 

9. Increase communication

If you’re lucky enough to struggle with online shopping demand you’ll be amazed at how understanding and forgiving your customers can be if you’re upfront and honest in your communication.

Be sure to send communication about your delivery times and scheduling promptly as soon as you notice an issue in the fulfilment of orders. A great tip is to prioritise customers who need gifts before Christmas.

An example of this would be to prioritise urgent birthday gifts while the fulfilment backtracking gets sorted. This way you provide a solution for your urgent customers who are very unhappy with the delay.

As long as you make a promise to send all other packages by a certain date, the majority of your customers will be understanding and forgiving.

Whatever you're offering this year, play it smart with implementing some of our Christmas business promotion ideas mentioned above. It’s not too late to introduce your Christmas promotions to capture this great end of year opportunity.

 

Spa blog ideas to increase website visitors

Are you looking at ways to bring in more traffic to your spa website but are stuck for spa blog ideas? 

In this post, we will give you lots of ideas on spa blog topics to generate traffic to your blog at no cost!

The world of digital marketing may be completely alien to you. But your passion and knowledge in the health and beauty world is your key to success.

Importance of a blog for your salon or spa

To be competitive in this day and age you must have a strong online presence- beginning with your website.

Many successful spas and salons all share their news, expertise and entertain with their audience via a blog.

Online presence and image

First of all, maintaining an up to date online presence is vital to keeping up with the competition.

Your potential customers will not only judge your online activity, but they will compare it to your competition. The website with the most persuasive and active online presence will sway votes in their favour.

Your online activity will tell your audience a story about your brand and image.

Appear at the top of Google search results

Your blog is where you can provide your customers and followers with a place to engage and be educated in your expertise! But more importantly, your blog is where you will be able to use SEO techniques to drive traffic to your website over competition.

The most important factor in getting high rankings on Google is to use keywords effectively, through a marketing strategy called Search Engine Optimisation (SEO).

Become industry experts

People will follow someone who knows what they are talking about. Your spa blog will be recommended and gain a reputation for having knowledge in the health and beauty industry.

People will pay more or be willing to travel further for better results. And better results often come with industry experts.

You need a platform to share your expertise and professional knowledge and what better way to do this than through your online presence?

How to create a spa blog ideas that your audience will want to read? 

Step 1:  Create your buyer persona.

The most important thing when deciding to start a blog for your spa is to decide on your target audience or your ‘buyer persona’. Each time you create a piece of marketing content, create it with your buyer persona in mind.

Step 2: Create content dedicated to your buyer persona.

Does your audience want educational content? Entertaining?  Informative?

An easy way to determine this is to look at your niche.

For a wellness spa revolving around holistic treatments and relaxation, your buyer persona is likely to be someone who looks after their health and well-being.

Or if you're a cosmetic spa or salon, your clientele may be more interested in ways they can maintain a youthful complexion.

Step 3: Apply SEO techniques to your content to yield the best traffic results

The key to using SEO techniques is to write about topics that include keywords your audience is searching.

We ran a quick check on the topic ‘reduce wrinkles’ for the purpose of this blog post, and we can see the most common questions asked by people around reducing wrinkles.

screenshot of SEMRush keyword research

This is a great way to write topics that match the exact phrases your audience are looking for. It also shows the volume of searches per month. So the keyword phrase ‘how to reduce wrinkles’ is searched for 260 times a month.

By plugging as many of these related keywords as throughout your post, you’ll improve your SEO score and people will likely click on your content for answers on their problems.

Over time, your audience will learn to view you as an expert and naturally turn to your services in the future.

Try out Keywords Everywhere, SEM Rush or even Answer the Public for some tools to find related keyword questions to your blog topics.

Spa blog ideas to increase website visitors - Try these topics!

spa blog ideas

Remember to write content that is either educational, entertaining or informational.

Here’s a quick list to give you ideas, combined with the application of the above steps.

 Include a CTA

A CTA (click through action) is usually at the end of a blog post or where you see applicable. But you want to lead your audience to another area on your website.

'Book here’, 'subscribe to our blog', or even a link to another blog post are some examples.

Marketing opportunities 

For more content marketing ideas on how you can use marketing strategies to promote your spa check out our post on Spa marketing strategies and promotions where we talk about social media pages, email campaigns and enlisting more potential clients.