Selling Gift Cards

It's true that gift cards can boost sales during the holidays and help you generate revenue through the year.  All of your competitors are going to be competing with you for a big slice of the gift card pie this season. Obviously you can place the cards by the registers and put marketing materials in your store - but what are you doing that your competitors aren't.

Try using social media to promote and sell your gift cards

If you have a Twitter or Facebook business account
Run a hastag contest on Twitter or a trivia contest on Facebook. Choose a participant at random to receive a $5 gift card. When the card is redeemed, the winner is likely to spend more than the value of the card. Better yet, that person will most likely tell his/her friends about the great experience he had with your business. Note: When you use Facebook for any type of solicitation, make sure you adhere to Face book's guidelines.

Hold secret giveaways
People love to be part of something exclusive. Encourage your fans and followers to buy cards with a "secret password" giveaway on the same day of the week every week. Give that day a catchy name. For example: Magic Monday, Terrific Tuesday, Wahda U Know Wednesday. On that day, release a password and give away a $5 gift card with any gift card purchase of $5 or more when your customer uses that password at the counter. Another option is to allow the use of the password with any online gift card purchase of $50 or more.

Make it a scavenger hunt
Hide a fully loaded gift card somewhere around town or around your neighborhood. Once it's been carefully secured, start giving clues on your social media pages about its location. As you continue to release clues, you are also reminding your fans that you sell gift cards.
 
IMPORTANT: Require the winner to post or tweet a photo of the location once it's found so that the rest of the searchers aren't left hanging and wondering about where/if the card was found.

Sign them up
Create an email marketing sign-up form on your Facebook page if you don't already have one. If you're not sure how to do that, you can use a third-party application to help. Promise to give a $50 gift card to one lucky winner who signs up for the email campaign during a specified time frame. Then add those email addresses to your database and use them for an email campaign. And the first campaign? Gift Cards, of course. Again, make sure you are following Facebooks guidelines.

                                                                                                             (Excerpted from an article from NCR/Radiant Systems)
Talk to you soon.  ~Norma