GiftCard Partners Blog

A great post from Prepaid Expo; they outline some interesting financial prepaid stats, usages, mobile stats  and more. Interesting information about the decline in use of cash; this is a fact that employers can keep in mind when planning employee incentives and rewards. Prepaid and gift cards aren’t just as good as cash…they ARE cash and loaded on mobile devices, they are the cash of the future! Here are the tidbits most interesting to us, click below for the whole shebang: - $82 billion. That's the amount expected to be loaded onto Prepaid cards in 2012. - Consumers are using prepaid cards as a way to access wages, direct deposits increased by nearly 70% in 2011. - Mobile POS payments is expected to grow from $362.6 million in 2011 to $1.4 billion in 2017. - The use of cash is predicted to decline 3% a year until 2015, through 2015, the use of cash will decline by nearly $200 billion. - Cash point-of-sale purchases is expected to drop to 23% by 2017.
More interesting stats from Prepaid Expo

The following infographic from
mashable.com shows how obesity, growing ever more prevalent in workplaces across the country, can cost your company valuable money and resources. Implementing health and wellness programs for employees using small incentives, such as gift cards to assist in living a healthy lifestyle, such as the
CVS/Pharmacy Select Card  or a GNC gift card can save your company money and keep your employees healthy, productive, and happy in their jobs. Check out the information below to help prevent obesity in your office.
 

Not seeing the response rate you're hoping for when it comes to your company’s news, emails and promotions? The answer could be as simple and as affordable as gift cards. If you feel like you’re pulling teeth to get people to interact or respond to your content then this small reward can go a long way in changing that. Purchasing gift cards in bulk saves you money and also guarantees you have enough plastic incentives for all your prospects, all year long. Gift cards are a perfect way to incentivize or reward future prospects for thinking twice before clicking that delete button and moving an inch to the right and clicking that golden 'subscribe' button; thus giving you the possibility of reaching a new audience. If you are reaching out to a relatively small audience then a $5 or $10 gift card to
CVS/pharmacy or
SUBWAY could be offered as an incentive to subscribe or give a referral. Not only are gift cards great for working within a tight budget but they also offer you the opportunity to grow your company's database and eventually capture leads & sales.

The Prepaid Expo tells us in the form of this infographic. We know our retailer and merchant gift card clients struggle with many of these challenges. There are additional challenges for those, like our clients, who are selling their prepaid products in the B2B market, and GCP supports and guides them through these challenges and those that will crop up. What % of these strategies and challenges are you dealing with?

As the economy continues to improve, I for one am thinking about how and where to vacation this summer. On a personal level, I know I will grab up deals with extra gift card dollars wherever I can find them. And with professional interest, Harris Interactive’s recent survey (on behalf of Choice Hotels) seems like really great timing for the loyalty rewards market. The survey reports that out of  the 2,100 U.S adults that were surveyed, over 87% of Americans plan to travel for leisure this summer, and they report that if they had an extra $50 to spend on their vacation, they'd be most likely to spend it on: