GiftCard Partners Blog

At GiftCard Partners, we strive to provide incentive and loyalty options featuring cards to the most popular brands on the market. One of our top-selling brands is The Cheesecake Factory, a restaurant known for its delicious food, Earth-shattering cheesecake and, of course, its homey, welcoming feeling. With over 30 years as a casual dining restaurant, The Cheesecake Factory uses fresh ingredients on over 200 different recipes. 

Because  The Cheesecake Factory gift cards can be used at any of the restaurants, nationwide, they make for a convenient and popular reward at countless loyalty, reward or incentive programs. At GiftCard Partners, we offer these cards to businesses of all sizes. That's why we have two options when it comes to ordering gift cards from The Cheesecake Factory:

For small businesses... We know how tough it can be to find reasonable prices as a smaller business. Because smaller companies sometimes miss out on discounts that larger ones get from buying in bulk, we want to make your gift card purchase as affordable and convenient as possible. That's why we offer:

It's no secret, people get sick and when battling a painful sore throat or ear infection waiting is NOT an option. Hence the growing popularity of walk-in health care clinics. CVS/pharmacy, the largest retail clinic operator in the Washington area, has more than 800 clinics nationwide, with plans to add more that 150 additional clinics by the end of 2014.
So what's the driving force? Several factors come into play fueling the trend of these walk-in health care clinics, one of which is the Affordable Care Act...sound familiar, you may have heard of it? With millions now being provided insurance through Medicaid, private plans or under their parents plans until age 26, getting in to see your primary care doctor quickly will be more difficult. This, along with a number of other factors, has allowed the perfect forum for retail clinics, like MinuteClinic, to take center stage. The clinics are staffed by nursed practitioners and physicians assistants and can treat anything from pink eye to strep throat, to sinus infections and minor injuries. Gift cards are even available at all 800 MinuteClinic locations and discounts are available on volume purchases. Learn more about buying MinuteClinic gift cards and giving the gift of health
here. Read more from The Washington Post about the growing trend of health care clinics
here.

As technology keeps expanding and growing, so do our payment systems. We're starting to see forward-thinking payment trends involving everything from mobile to loyalty rewards. Here are some of the latest movements in payment technology:
Mobile Capability With so many now owning smartphones, online shopping has seen a huge jump in mobile business. Because of this jump, companies are now placing a higher focus on mobile capability payments.  Plus, now the focus goes beyond smartphones as payment systems are also being developed and tested for tablet optimization as well.
Focus on Omniconsumers While mobile functionality is a very important factor for those in the payment industries, it's not only about mobile right now. Younger users are known for paying on a variety of different platforms, meaning the highest functioning payment systems will have to cater to a variety of different channels.
A Blur Between Physical and Online Shopping Consumers are not sold on only in-person or only online shopping. Many prefer to utilize both. That means that a majority of complaints that come from these double shoppers is centered around consistency between the products offered and product pricing. Smart companies are working to create consistency between off and online, especially when it comes to utilizing coupons and coupon codes.
Loyalty Rewards Loyalty rewards are becoming tremendously popular with consumers. Now, 73 percent of consumers carry loyalty rewards cards for their favorite businesses. And they don't keep it down to just one. One out of 10 customers carry six or more loyalty cards on any given day. This only goes to show the tremendous growth that the loyalty and reward businesses are seeing and will continue to see in years, and even months, to come.
For more information, read "The Ten Hottest Trends in Payments."

Gift cards are a great incentive to get employees to perform a certain behavior at a certain time, aligning your customers to advance your business goals. A great example of gift card use for mutual consumer and retailer benefit is currently being displayed by Microsoft with relation to the phase out of Windows XP. Microsoft will cease providing support and updates for the operating system next week, so the software giant is providing gift cards to any consumers who purchases a laptop running Windows 8.1 and can prove they previously had a computer running Windows XP. The gift card is good for laptops over $599 and also include a limited amount of tech support. Windows needs consumers to phase out use of Windows XP to prevent security issues for their customers. And if you're running a computer with Windows XP, chances are you could use a new laptop. The leverage gift cards provide solve both issues, while still offering consumers a choice in which product they upgrade to and giving them a wide time range to take advantage of the offer. How could you use gift cards to leverage your consumers' behavior?
For more information on the Microsoft offer or to learn how to use gift cards to prompt consumer behavior check out this article from Incentive Magazine.

A new whitepaper is out from marketing services agency P&MM and it proves a lot of what we have previously based employee motivation initiatives on: you can't motivate employees who aren't engaged. Engaging employees is the first step toward motivation them. Engage employees in their every day work by providing employees with professional development, training and the occasional fun organization activity.