Gift Certificates Basics

Using business gift certificates for promotion and reward

If your business offers a fairly inexpensive service, or you own a retail store, you can definitely benefit from offering business gift certificates. If it doesn't fall into one of those categories, such as a real estate firm, you may be more interested in using a corporate gift card program to give employee morale a lift.

In some cases, business owners use both. They offer gift cards for their business to customers and gift cards to other businesses as employee incentives. Here are some steps to take before you launch your gift card initiative:

1. Think about whether offering paper custom gift certificates or plastic gift cards is feasible and cost effective.

2. Look into employee incentive programs that feature gift cards as rewards.

3. Learn how to effectively market either of these gift card programs.

Consider selling custom business gift cards

A good thing about having a gift certificate system in place is that it not only encourages current customers to come back, but it can also be a promotional tool to bring in new customers. Oftentimes, customers who are happy with your business will buy gift certificates to give to friends, especially if you offer a promotion.

Look into gift certificates for business incentive programs

It's a pretty good bet that, if you offer an employee an incentive gift certificate, he or she won't want to use it at the workplace. The employee is probably more interested in shopping, traveling or dining out elsewhere. Thus, if you want to really reward employees for increasing sales, generating leads and the like, consider purchasing gift cards from other businesses or joining a points-type incentive program.

Learn how to market your gift certificate program

Another important point in gift certificates basics is knowing how to promote your gift certificate program. If you have it in place and no one uses it, you are out your time and money for no reason. The good thing is, once you get people excited about it, word of mouth will make your job a lot easier.

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