Forgive me if my sympathy for retailers’ complaints about lagging holiday sales is somewhat muted. This is what happens when marketers en masse downplay the biggest present category of the season: gift cards.
In 2007 merchants treated this category as the redheaded stepchild of holiday offerings. Few catalogs featured cover lines promoting these cards, nor did they offer them as a highlighted option on order forms.
Internet marketers were guilty of the same sin of omission: Web site landing pages that offered one-click opportunities to obtain them were largely a hit-or-miss proposition.
Despite this, they were the number-one requested present category, edging out apparel, electronics and books, according to the National Retail Federation. But you’d never know this by looking at catalogs, mailers and newspaper inserts. Where were the soft-focus images of a gift card surrounded by all the wonderful (read: high margin) items they could be redeemed for?
Marketers may have missed out this past holiday season, but it’s not too early to start positioning gift cards for 2008. Moving them front and center within promotional pieces is a start.
But there is much opportunity beyond that. Take presentation possibilities. Gift cards are currently served up in everything ranging from plain white envelopes to brightly wrapped three-dimensional boxes complete with a catalog and a small retailer-branded promotional tchotchke. By holiday 2008, a variation on the latter should be standard industry practice.
For some, gift cards still carry the stigma of a last minute, or a “you weren’t worth the effort”, gift. Marketers can counteract this by providing an online form that allows givers to pick out a few gifts covered by the card’s value. This list could then be printed out — sans prices — and given alongside the card, effectively creating a gift suggestion registry.
Setting up such a registry gives people who love to shop a chance to do so, while allowing them to say “I was going to pick up some frankincense, but I thought you might prefer a nice onesie with a bunny on it.”
As for the cards themselves: Basic design holds that a marketer’s Web site address should be printed right on the card. Marketers can give an additional incentive to log onto the Web site by putting a unique code on each card. The code would then link back to a personal message written by the giver. Does it make the gift more personalized? Yup. Does it also get the recipient right onto the e-commerce site? Double yup.
Marketers know gift cards offer two huge benefits, aside from generating revenue. First, they provide a way for existing customers to offer the strongest form of endorsement to potential new customers. Second, they can take advantage of the fact that recipients often spend more than the card’s value during the redemption process. Marketers writing copy for their gift card promotions should tweak their pitches with an eye toward both of these very lucrative results.
Finally, there are back-office considerations. All channels — Web site, phone center and retail outlets — should be primed to process gift card orders as smoothly as possible. This is so basic that it shouldn’t need to be mentioned — except inevitably a potentially valuable new customer will run into the one service rep who hasn’t been trained in card redemption processes. At which point all the clever come-hither marketing practices are effectively wasted.
Merry pre-Christmas 2008 marketing.
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