GiftCard Partners Blog

Gift cards give peace of mind to the giver; nearly 1/3 of respondents to a recent TD Bank survey, “…believes the greatest stresses lie in not knowing what to buy or worrying whether the recipient will like the gift.” Don’t stress, give gift cards. Companies like
GCP sell gift cards to companies giving corporate gifts to partners, customers and employees. It makes fiscal sense, as there are discounts offered for various levels of buying in bulk. Why are gift cards the most coveted gift to receive this holiday season? Your employees will use them to button up last minute shopping, 31% of respondents of the survey said they look to use their gift cards for day-to-day expenses like groceries. You’ll be offering your employees and customers more than a holiday gift; you’ll be offering them help. For more up-to-date consumer sentiments and statistics on gift cards, read:
Spending Expected to Hold Steady This Year with Gift Cards the Preferred Gift

Although our industry trend reports are typically focused on B2B gift card topics and industry events; we thought that “Turning Negativity into Engagement" is a particularly important topic as our clients and customers enter into an uncertain holiday season. At this year’s MoShow we were reminded of some valuable lessons in listening and reacting. We’re happy to share with you a presentation around embracing technology to
listen to your customers, to bring your brand and brand programs closer to enlightenment. Are you willing to accept social media and online networks as listening tools, to assess your customers’ opinions and react? Many believe that adopting these technologies could back-fire on a brand in an all-too-public forum. But consider that negative conversations about your brand are happening online, whether you are present or not…how you listen and address them could be the difference between a proactive leader and a tarnished reputation. Some really great advice and answers to these nagging concerns come to us in a presentation given at the MoShow’s Incentive Gift Card Council (IGCC) meeting. This presentation, by Mike McDonnell, Vice President, Product Management & Client Solutions at
Affinion Loyalty Group, offers fresh perspectives and real-world examples of how to turn negativity into opportunities for engagement in
The Bright Side of Negative Engagement. This presentation will help you determine a critical response to a negative customer experience and help you answer the important question,”What’s Your White Chocolate Mickey?”
Click here to read the rest of GCP’s Industry Trend Report  

Timeliness!

Incentive Magazine recently published an article called
“Forget Employee of the Month and Focus on Employee of the Moment”, where they discussed the rise of importance of immediate rewards for brilliant performance. In the past year, our connected sociability brought a 250% increase in tweets per day, 100% growth of LinkedIn users, and Facebook’s increases logins to 250 million each day, indicating a rapidly growing culture of immediacy. How does this effect HR professionals? Razor Suleman’s Incentive article announces that it’s time to institute an “Employee of the Moment” strategy by launching a social networking campaign to:

Veteran’s Day is this Friday, November 11th and we're seeing lots of gift card promotions, offers and sales …but how many of them actually benefit US Veterans? One VA Medical Center held a women’s health program that gave away $20 gift cards to women who received HIV testing in the month of September. This was a great way to support our veterans while promoting routine female healthcare checks and disease control. You may know that GCP has been collecting and sharing the great employer health and wellness uses of gift cards that we are capturing in our series of surveys –
check out our blog: Health and Wellness Employer Gift Card Successes: for more great healthcare gift card uses. Source:
The Business Journal of Greater Milwaukee

eGift and mobile gift cards are a popular topic as excitement grows around digital technologies. CreditCards.com reports that one half of the major gift card brands that offer eGift cards only started offering them this year. Retailers and merchants are ramping up to take advantage of growing mobile and tablet buying segments, as they are quickly becoming some of the most valuable online shoppers. Interestingly, when GCP recently surveyed B2B gift card buyers; we found that the B2B market still prefers to purchase physical plastic cards over