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.
Try: If you don't have your own high-end printer order preprinted paper gift certificates from a company like Smart Resolution. If your certificates look very amateurish, people might think the same of your business. Consider plastic gift cards, such as the ones from Plastic Printers. if your budget is a bit bigger. Note that you will need a cash register that can read the cards, unless you require customers to use them all at once -- like coupons.

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.
Try: Check out PlasticJungle, a company that sells gift cards at a discount on their face value. Or, contact the business you'd like to buy from and ask if it reduces costs if you order in bulk. If you don't want to do the heavy lifting, hire a company like Perks. Then you can simply reward employees with points they can use to choose a corporate gift certificate from an online or paper catalog.

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.
Try: Food and Beverage Underground has some good ideas on getting customers to buy gift cards, such as placing an ad at the bottom of each register check. If you're looking into starting an employee incentive program, read Winston J. Brill & Associates' article on the matter. It will give you some advice on seeing it through.

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