As a retailer, what do you normally consider offering for holidays? Gift Cards, right? Even Starbucks, Amazon or Walmart could never miss this chance to sell thousands (or even more) Gift Cards on holiday every year, truly. So, if you decided to run a gift card campaign in the next holiday and wanna know what’s the process, you’ve come to the right place.
Assuming that I’m running a business that sells bath stuff (bath accessories, bath sets, etc), for all genders. I have both online store and some local stores, but mostly sell online. And it’s few weeks to go before Christmas coming to town, so it must be quick. How can I boost sales without too much discount like 50% OFF, and I can still keep things on track even after Christmas.
Gift Card is what I need – for several reasons:
- It’s a popular gift on holidays – especially for those who are busy and short in time. I do love to target these last-minute shoppers (as they are not price sensitive!).
- I can acquire many new customers coming to my store as gift cards normally used as gift items.
- I can even increase sales after holiday ends because people will start using gift cards to buy stuff.
So a Gift Card campaign is decided, and what I need to do now is;
- Define Gift Card strategy
- Setting up Gift Card on stores
- Start promoting campaign.
GIFT CARD STRATEGY
Average order value of my store is $45. So I wanna sell $50 Gift Card at a price of $43 (about 14% off), mostly online (but they can still be used offline, at my local stores) as it’s where my customers be active the most. 200 Gift cards seems to be a proper number to be sold. In brief, what I need now is:
- 200 Gift Cards with different gift codes, each can be used once only.
- Gift Card face value: $50. Gift Card product price: $43.
- Gift Cards can be used both online and offline, or send to friends via email or post – this is a must have – as the “gifting” feature is essential in this case.
- A great gift card design in Christmas theme. However I’m not an expert on this, so it’d better have design template somewhere… A minimal style is the best!
- Campaign running time: 3 weeks until Christmas.
- Promoting channels: Social channels, email and in-store promotion.
SETTING UP GIFT CARDS
My store does not have Gift Card module, so I used Gift Card feature by Magestore – one of the most powerful Magento Extensions for Gift Card out there, with Magento 2 version. It assist me with all I need and here’s how I create my Gift Card product:
And set price and value for Gift card. Yeah, face value is $50 and price is $43, just perfect!
The great thing here is that I can also create Gift card template on my own, or choose from default styles for each gift card. In the downloadable package of Gift Card extension, I found hundreds templates designed for major holidays (Christmas, Thanksgiving, Birthday, Valentine’s Day, Halloween…) – that is a plus for non-designer like me. All i need to do here is to upload templates that I love, and let customers pick one among those or upload images on their own.
I can even set the rules for the Gift Cards to be applied, based on Shopping cart rule or Catalog rule. For example: customers can only use Gift Card to purchase other items only if subtotal order is greater than $100, or the Gift Card can only be used for items in specific categories. However, I don’t need that rules here. Christmas Gift Card should be a little more special, right?
And this is how it appears on my store:
View how customers can create their own Gift Cards here:
So, I’m kinda ready for the campaign and now, it’s time to make it flourish! These are channels that I consider promoting on:
- Social Channels: Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
- My store’s blog.
- Send emails to all subscribers and customers. They will be the ones who wanna receive deals from me the most.
- Store’s slider banner and dashboard banner. A popup will work also.
So, that’s how draft out my Gift Card campaign for Christmas (applicable for other holidays also). Hope you and your campaign will be fabulous and, Merry Christmas!
