Gift cards are great for everyone. They’re easy gifts to give, awesome to receive, and even better to sell. They’re enormously popular for restaurants, and they offer a wide range of benefits that help support business and brand. From encouraging repeat customers to boosting sales, gift cards should absolutely be available at your restaurant.
Here’s four ways to help your restaurant sell more gift cards.
Sell them online. If a customer is considering to purchase a gift card from your restaurant, you’re going to want to make that as easy as possible. By selling your gift cards online, you give the customer greater flexibility, and lower the odds that they might end up going to one of your competitors instead (possibly someone else who does sell gift cards online). You can offer digital gift cards that are delivered instantly, or you can send them by mail if they would prefer.
Promote gift card sales around the holidays. When the next holiday rolls around, make sure you’re promoting your gift cards front-and-center. According to GiftCards.com, restaurant gift cards are the top category of gift cards that people plan to purchase for holiday gifting. Whatever time of year it is, there is almost always an upcoming holiday. Between Christmas, Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, Easter, and Valentine’s Day, you’ve got a lot to work with.
Pair gift cards with your loyalty program. Have a loyalty program? Try offering incentives (like loyalty points) to your loyalty members who choose to purchase gift cards. That way, you’re rewarding your most loyal customers for investing a set sum of money before they’ve even sat down to eat. Another way to get gift cards involved in your loyalty program is to offer them as rewards. According to Hawk Incentives, 82% of millennials are interested in redeeming accumulated loyalty points for a gift card.
Gift card deals. To give sales a boost, try offering a bonus on gift card purchases. For example: “Purchase a $50 gift card and receive $10 bonus credit!” If your first reaction to that idea is to think it sounds like a waste of money on your behalf, let me reassure you that it is not. When customers have a gift card, they feel like they can spend a lot more. Think of it as a financial cushion of sorts. In fact, according to BigCommerce, customers spend an average of 38% more than the value on their card.
Promote Your Restaurant With CoGoBuzz
Give your restaurant a digital makeover with CoGoBuzz, our state-of-the-art digital marketing service. With CoGoBuzz, we leverage state-of-the-art WiFi, SMS, and Email solutions to promote your restaurant both in-store and out, straight to customer mobile devices. Through a one-time login to your in-store HotSpot, CoGoBuzz displays an interactive landing page on customer mobile devices. On top of that, CoGoBuzz comes packed with a fully digital text-based loyalty program. Want to let your loyalty members know you’re running a deal on gift cards? And they can get points for it? Let them know with a quick and easy text!
Want to learn more about CoGoBuzz? Check out the rest of our website!
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What does your restaurant do to push gift cards? Sound off in the comments!