Time to spring clean your gift voucher offering?

gift voucher offering

With business-as-usual suspended during lockdown, you may have been taking time to review some of your systems and processes. Your gift voucher offering is one area that can be reviewed during the downtime and given a makeover before you open up again.

Once your online shop is in place to take and fulfil orders, it can be easy to push gift vouchers to the back of your mind. Now could be an opportune moment to check that your gifts are up to date and to think about how to add gift voucher promotions to your marketing plans.

Setting aside an hour to review and update your gift voucher offering will certainly pay dividends over the course of the year.

Analyse Sales Figures

Identify which gifts sell well and look at those that haven’t been so popular. This information can be seen in summary format in the One Tree Portal under Reporting. The data can be exported to a spreadsheet for further analysis.

Review gift range

If some of gift experiences don’t sell well, consider tweaking the name, description or pictures, or change the order in which the gifts appear on the page.

A ‘Celebration Stay’ sounds more enticing to a gift buyer than Dinner, Bed and Breakfast, for example.

Expand your range if it is currently limited, or remove poorly-selling gifts and replace them with something more appealing. Add categories to your account to subdivide the gifts. (Please contact us for more information on how to do this.)

Read the wording on the gift experiences to make sure that the descriptions accurately reflect the services being provided.

Pricing

Check that gift voucher pricing is still current against your tariff. From the sales analysis, it is possible to identify popular price points for gifts purchased. Additional gift packages around these levels could boost sales. Review monetary amounts available and adjust if necessary.

Visibility

View your website as if you are looking at it for the first time. Are the gift vouchers well signposted and easy to find, with clear navigation and icons or images to attract customers? If your vouchers are not obvious to you, or colleagues, they won’t be found by anyone else. Are they easy to see on the mobile version of your site?

Promotions

50% of gift voucher sales take place in November and December, with the other 50% taking place over the remaining 10 months of the year. Christmas provides the major impetus for gift buying, but vouchers are bought throughout the year for birthdays, anniversaries and to say ‘thank you’.

Guests buy experience gifts because they want to share their own lifestyle choices with their friends. A constant presence in the annual promotions plan is therefore essential. Click here for an infographic showing when sales are made.

Digital promotions

Footers on emails
Newsletter templates
Social media posts

In-house

Signs at reception
Adverts/posters
Receipts
Cards in bill folders
Printed brochures
Audio/visual displays
Information folders in rooms

One Tree provides free marketing resources to help clients promote their gift vouchers.  See our Marketing Resources page for seasonal and evergreen packages.

If you would like to find our more about how an online gift voucher service would benefit your business, please send an email or call us on 01761 472911.

Author :

Louise has spent her marketing career working on software products and systems that help companies make more money with less effort. She is an expert in gift voucher marketing and loves sharing that knowledge with clients in the hospitality industry.