Gift Vouchers – Sales you get pre-paid for

Gift vouchers are one of the many useful tools a business has to promote themselves to new customer and retain existing ones. They are low cost to produce and sell themselves. They don’t have to be tied in to any product or service, and have a far longer promotion life than any single advert. The best thing of all, people have already paid you, they’ve just not decided for what. So we are going to look at what Gift Vouchers are, what they can do, and what do they need to have to be effective.
We have already covered Gift Vouchers before in the blog, but it’s been a while since we last talked about them, so it’s a good time to do so again. So what are Gift Vouchers? Simply put a gift voucher is a pre-paid credit note from your business that can be used by a customer to pay for your services or goods at a later point in time. This is different from such things a discount coupon (get x % off a service/item) or a promotional device (get x when you do y ). Gift vouchers are not usually tied to a product, they are simply a form of ‘money’ that customer can only use with you. When someone buys the gift voucher, you have already got the money but you haven’t supplied the service or goods yet.

So why use them?

Gift Vouchers go beyond being simply a way to get money. Essentially they are the best kind of advertising a business can have because it is a recommendation from one person to another about how good your business is. Personal recommendations are the most powerful form of advertising there is. If you record the details of the person who buys the voucher and the person who spends it, that gives you two people who are clients you want to keep because they value what you do. Want to see how successful your involvement in an event or promotion run by someone else?  Then offer the event a lower value voucher at your cost to track the customer response to it. With gift vouchers having a dollar value instead of a product value, it allows you to hook customers who are unsure if what you offer is the right gift, because the gift getter can pick what they want instead of the gift giver having to guess. Another way of using gift vouchers is as a form of credit note, because if someone has overpaid or you want to give the customer a bonus, why not do it in a form where money has to be spent with you anyway. We cover this in more detail in this article on why to use Gift Vouchers

Are there downsides to using them?

If the vouchers are setup correctly, the only downside is there is a little more administration work involved, tracking what has been given out and when it’s been spent. Most modern till systems have support for dealing with gift vouchers, but even just a pen & notebook can keep a track of them if you use vouchers only occasionally. We talk about how to design a gift voucher and how to keep track of gift vouchers in those articles.

Why get you to print vouchers when my till can do it?

With a lot of cloud based / smart till systems used by people these days, they will often come with a Gift Voucher system available. So why go to the expense of having Copy Express create and / or print gift vouchers. Simply put, till based voucher don’t look that good because they are always printed by the thermal receipt printer so there is a limit to the quality and format. A gift voucher is promoting your business and don’t you want to give the best impression possible. With us printing them, we are not limited to any fixed size and format. We can create something unique to you, with a huge range of finishes and formats.

Is it costly to do, and how long does it take to make them?

Actually no it isn’t. There will be some cost in setting up the design the first time, but after that the printing cost are quite economical. The most common sized voucher we do is the size of a $20 note in a 20 page checkbook style format printed in full colour on a quality paper, five of those books work out to being about $0.66 per voucher with most businesses putting a sales value of $10 or more. Again after the design is set up, a normal run is no more than 2-3 business days, and that’s only because there’s a bit of labour involved.
If you want to learn more about the gift vouchers then have a look at the other articles on the subject we have linked here. If you want to know more then Copy Express is just a email or phone call away.

So if we have got you interested in having gift vouchers made, why not contact Copy Express today and we can step you through your options so you get the perfect solution to your needs.