Gift Vouchers – 7 good reasons to be using them in your business

Gift vouchers, they are everywhere. Go to the supermarket and you will see racks by the checkouts with cards you can load up with money. Every big holiday and observed events like Mothers’ Day have promotions about selling special vouchers for those days. Even with the debacle of the receivership of Dick Smith Electronics resulting in them not honoring their gift vouchers, they are still a very popular gift for people to give and a great way to promote your business to prospective customers. So what can you do to get these vouchers into people’s hands, and their money in your bank?

I have written quite a bit about gift vouchers over the 3+ years I’ve been writing this blog and how they can help your business. Infact if you go to this page you will be able to access what I have already written. I won’t hash over the same information again, instead I’ll talk about why you should be using gift vouchers to promote your business and how to do it. 
The why is simple enough. You want income, you want a no fuss marketing tool, a way of building customer relationships, and ultimately you want an expanded client/customer base. Gift vouchers can do all of that when handled correctly. Let me explain how in a few quick bullet points?

• It comes with the best advertising of all, a personal recommendation of someone the recipient knows. Recommendations of people who we trust are still the most powerful motivation to try a product or service we have never used before. Gift vouchers are all about that.
• It’s money waiting to be spent. People don’t want to waste money, and since it’s already been spent, they don’t want waste it by letting it expire, so it motivates the recipient to spend it. If your gift vouchers don’t have an expiry date, get them printed with a space for one now!
• It gives people freedom of choice. Because gift vouchers can be used for anything, people are more likely to use it than any discount flier. You can include limitations on your vouchers if you want, but more you limit it the less likely people will buy them as gifts.
• It can be part of an existing sale as a ‘discount.’ This is where you can’t discount a high ticket item, but by including a gift voucher that they can spend at later date. This will generally result them being used on things that generally have much lower cost value meaning the actual cost to your business is far less than giving the original discount.
• You can still treat them as a promotional flyer to encourage existing customers who haven’t spent with you in a while to spend again. Keep the face value low and require a minimum spend amount and you can use them to at least cover the costs of any thing you sell. This works really well with social media platforms like Facebook where you can have a promotion of fixed number of free gift vouchers that build a buzz around your business but limits the overall cost to you.
• They work great as part of sponsorship deals. A lot of smaller organisations love gift vouchers for raffles and events, because being so general purpose people are more likely to bid for them. For your business, they are great because it generally get spread over the cost over several items instead of just one, reducing the overall raw cost to you.
• Have an item a customer has brought back and wants a refund on but it’s past the normal right of return period? Turn that unhappy customer into a happy one by offering gift vouchers instead of the cash refund. You are stuck writing off the cost of the item no matter what, so at least the voucher stops the money leaving your store and going into someone’s bank instead.

All of these examples show how the gift voucher promotes your business to both new and existing clients, allows you to give discounts without having to give away too much money, and build your business reputation. This is all just scratching the surface of what Gift Vouchers can do for any business, why not call us at Copy Express to learn how they can work for you.