The Home Depot’s Gift Card Strategy Advice
It’s holiday corporate gift giving season and gift card promotion time, but some retailers aren’t losing track of their long term goals and strategies. Forbes.com presents The Home Depot’s advice to retailers and merchants on developing their gift card strategy, including their placement in B2B programs like corporate incentive programs, the importance of personalization, promoting eGift Cards, mobile and social channels, and more. GiftCard Partners is always proud to bring you examples of who is doing B2B gift cards right! Read on to discover
The Home Depot’s best in breed advice for gift card strategies. Source: Forbes.com MarketShare
The Sky is NOT Falling on Plastic Gift Cards
With all the hub bub about prepaid technologies like mobile wallets, mCerts and virtual gift cards, Ben Jackson from Mercator Advisory Group, offers us his calming and factual perspective in
“The future form of closed-loop gift cards – Reports of plastic’s demise are greatly exaggerated”. Ben examines 3 great lessons of history to temper the overstated destiny of plastic gift cards and advises “that new technologies do not always completely distance old ones”. The history lessons offer great perspective that “There will always be a place for plastic, but (the) day will soon arrive where virtual cards and mobile cards will be a necessary part of every issuer’s prepaid strategy. The task for issuers is to figure out what needs each form factor fills and tailor their program to make each work towards the best results”, states Jackson. This is great advice for issuers, retailers and merchants as they look to grow their businesses with diversity versus alienating parties via the next big technology.
From our Q2 Industry Trend Report: Are you an online retailer ...or Not?
In our constant efforts to stay apprised of up and coming gift card technologies, GiftCard Partners recently investigated which of the Top 50 Retailers(1) are accepting gift cards as payment online. We found that over half of the Top 50 retailers do. Among those that don’t, they are primarily restaurants or drugstores. Getting in touch with your gift card e-retail side is now more important than ever. Wide-spread broad-band across America has contributed to an increase of internet users, from 55% to a whopping 84% in the last 10 years(2). Not only will adopting online gift card redemption enhance customer convenience, increase sales, and amplify loyalty; it is also a foray into the mobile internet realm, which is predicted to overtake desktop internet usage by 2013(3). No matter the size of your business, not accepting online gift card redemption is a missed opportunity to engage with customers via their potential preferred researching and buying method. Other opportunities include: * Decrease in breakage (if they are in your breakage #’s they are lost customers)
Potential Pitfalls of the Daily-Deal
Daily deal sites are increasingly popular with consumers across the country, however they are posing increasing problems with the retailers who offer these "too good to be true" deals. Be careful how your company interacts with daily deal sites so they attract more customers, and don't cost your business too much potential revenue. For example, if you give gift cards away at a discount is that too much free money? Here are some tips to success in the daily deal arena:
Virtual Wallets: What are they…Really?
This post might look familiar to you; we've added an update further down the page. Wikipedia outlines a “Virtual Wallet” as a hybrid checking/savings account with 3 components: a "Spend" account (checking), a "Reserve" account (backup checking, incurs interest), and a"Growth" account (savings). This is a pretty narrow view of a virtual wallet (note to self, update Wikipedia).
Virtual wallets are cropping up not just from banks for online banking; they are being offered by credit card companies, SmartPhone providers, and there are even free versions that stores, manages, and organizes digital versions of store membership cards, coupons, loyalty cards, virtual gift cards, or any other piece of information that you store in your traditional wallet. Windows even offers a PC software version of a virtual wallet, but it’s more focused on protecting all those passwords, account numbers, and access codes vs. making purchases and using your loyalty rewards points or gift cards.
GiftCard Partners feels the Virtual Wallet that will not only change our way of shopping, paying, and redeeming, but will also combine the best of the above types and allow us to:
