Social media gift cards promotions

3 min read

Want to know how you can sell more gift cards with social media gift cards promotions? 

Ensure optimal success with your gift card sales by promoting them in the right places. 

There are over 3.6 billion people on social media today, with this number estimated to grow to over 4.41 billion in 2025. 

The marketing landscape is changing, to be competitive you need to be proactive on social media, especially when it comes to promoting your gift cards. 

In this post, we are going to look at the different ways you should be using social media to promote and sell your gift cards. 

The purchasing behaviour of gift cards is changing

2020 so far has been full of turmoil for the hospitality industry with forced closures, furloughed staff and sadly even mass job losses. 

One of the major crutches many businesses leaned on during the lockdown of the Coronavirus pandemic was selling gift vouchers, (or for the US market, gift cards). While the damage to revenue from COVID19 closures could not be saved, gift card sales certainly helped mitigate revenue losses. 

As we highlighted in our Case Study: Celtic Manor Resort gift experiences during COVID-1 we can see a prime example of how The Celtic Manor Resort has perfected the art of promoting gift cards to the individual to enjoy a gift experience themselves. With their  ‘Celtic at home’ takeaway experience, more people were purchasing the gift cards to treat themselves as well as others. 

For businesses like you, this turns the marketing of gift cards on its head! 

One thing we can learn from the Coronavirus pandemic is that people don’t necessarily need an occasion to consider purchasing a gift card. Enabling you to create a constant drip-feed of voucher sales throughout the year. 

That’s why it’s important that you communicate directly with your audience through social media. According to Hootsuite a whopping 52% of all online brand discovery happens in social feeds. 

So without further ado, let's dive into the social tactics you can use to sell your gift cards directly to your audience. 

Social media promotion tactics

Here are some social media promotion tactics to boost the sale of your gift cards. 

1. Choose your images with precision 

Get your message across with an impact! Careful considerations must go into the images you choose for your brand’s marketing. That also includes the images you choose for social media. Not only do images communicate a message, but they also leave a print on your memory and help create sales! 

Hootsuite found that in less than a second, weak social ads create a negative emotional response. So using high-quality visuals for your promotions is paramount! 

Here’s how you can create images that persuade buyers: 

A candid shot of a woman in a pool

A posed shot of a woman in a pool

Include people in candid shots

Images that display just one person, who looked away from the camera sold the best according to Contently. They found that candid images made viewers be able to imagine more easily they were the person in the frame. 

Take a look at these images for example. Which sells an experience better? We'll leave it to you to decide.

When it comes to selling gift cards, it is the experience that people are drawn to. 

Capture a feeling

Another way to draw desire to your images is to convey a feeling. For example, you could focus on capturing the feeling of ‘love’ rather than making someone look rich. Do you notice the subtle difference between the two? One focuses on the feelings created, the other focuses on an image. 

Sizing of images

Make sure your images are all sized correctly for your different social profiles. Each network requires different dimensions. A great way to get around this is to post through tools such as Canva which are designed ready to fit your social network pages. 

2. Use persuasive wording to create an emotional appeal

Experiences have a strong impact because of how they make people feel. This is worth more to consumers than just plain old ‘stuff’. So use persuasive wording to accompany your gift card promotions on social media such as the following:

‘Make memories’ 

‘Don’t miss out’  

‘Give yourself a break/ treat’ 

All these phrases create an emotional appeal and tap into the FOMO (fear of missing out)!

3. Make the gift experience feel exclusive

If someone knows something is always available they will almost always put it down and come back to it later at a more convenient time. However, if they feel the item is running low in stock there is a stronger compulsion to purchase right away! 

This is certainly the case with selling online gift cards. Therefore, a great social media promotional tactic is to make them feel more valuable by limiting the purchase time. 

Whether you sell for a limited time or a limited amount, try to create that feeling of scarcity and exclusivity. 

4. Promote User-Generated Content 

Around 50% of all purchase decisions are driven by word-of-mouth marketing. This is because your customers want to see real people using your products and services. 

People also want to relieve any worries about their intended purchases by reading reviews from normal people just like them. 

But don’t worry as you don’t necessarily need Influencers to sell your brand. You can effectively entice your existing customers to be your brand advocates with simple encouragement in the form of freebies and discounts.

You can simply do this by asking your customers who have purchased your gift cards to share photos of their experience on social media using certain hashtags. This way, all your brand advocates and their testimonials appear in one place if you get searched by new customers. It’s also easy for you to find if you want to share (with permission) on your own social media pages. 

Having others vouch for your products and services is the easiest way to gain credibility to your brand.

Hashtag tips: 

It's important for all of your social media gift cards promotions to have a significant hashtag.  Create your branded hashtag to be evergreen. This means that it can be used far into the future. So exclude dates and seasonal events in your hashtags. A hashtag also allows you to find all the content with your promotions easily in one place. 

Send an email campaign to all of your existing customers who have previously bought a gift card to share their photos online using your hashtag. Be sure to include social sharing buttons in your message to make this process seamless and convenient. 

Use Influencers

Influencer marketing can bring in huge returns with an average of $6.50 in revenue for every $1 spent on an influencer. With many marketers rating influencers as their fastest-growing channel for acquiring customers.

Twitter ran a study which found that people put the same amount of trust in an influencer as their own friends.

So try and find an influencer for your brand before they get swamped with demands! 

5. Hold a contest on social media

Social media giveaways and contests are one of the fastest ways to gain new followers and increase engagement with your brand. Outgrow.co found that Instagram is the fastest platform for growing followers through competitions by a massive 70%.

For the amount of exposure and new sales generated, holding social media contests for your gift cards are an extremely cost-effective marketing tactic. 

Take a look at our spa marketing ideas and promotions where we discuss how to run social media competitions

6. Talk and engage with your audience

For 23% of people, a brand with high engagement is more compelling for them to purchase from. So be sure to reply to comments on your posts, how you engage will have an effect on people's perception of you as a brand also. 

7. Make the purchasing process simple

Use clickable and trackable CTAs (Call-to-action’s). These are clickable buttons that you install on your social media posts that will prompt your audience to do something. In the case of gift cards, it’s to make a purchase. 

Have direct CTAs such as ‘buy today’, ‘purchase now’. This avoids the transparent beat-around-the-bush messaging that can be off-putting to people. If someone likes your advertising they will appreciate the directness because they WANT to buy it. Make this process as fast and convenient for them as possible. 

8. Get a verified business badge for your social profiles

A verified business badge conveys the message that you’re a trustworthy and reliable business. This will enable your audience to feel more confident with purchasing from you, especially if they have anxiety around not knowing what to expect as a first-time customer of yours. 

Good luck on your gift card sales. As we’ve mentioned in previous posts, it is essential that businesses are setting up well-executed social media promotions to sell more gift cards. 

If you want any further information on the gift card system we provide, please get in contact with us.

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