How to integrate e-gift cards into your Christmas marketing strategy?

The holiday season is a crucial time for marketing teams across brands and retailers. As the top event in terms of business volume, Christmas is when all of France embarks on the gift-giving rush. The challenge for marketers: ensuring customers choose their brand. To achieve this, they must adapt to the latest holiday shopping behaviors and expectations, offering a customer experience and strategy that stands out from the fierce competition. They aren’t afraid to leverage new technologies and activate all available channels. This year, utilizing digital gift cards could be an innovative path to explore.

Why incorporating digital gift cards is key to a successful holiday strategy

Digital gift cards: gaining popularity at christmas

The digital gift card is rapidly gaining traction, capturing 61% of the market share in the United States, and France is following this trend. For brands, offering a digital card has become essential, especially during the holiday season when sales can increase tenfold.

A hassle-free gift

Quick to purchase and send, the digital gift card is perfect for busy consumers. Its customizable nature makes it a more thoughtful gift than cash, while also being an excellent tool for brands to reach new audiences.

Happy recipients

 Recipients, especially millennials, love digital gift cards for their flexibility. With the ability to choose their own gift, they are never disappointed. The accessibility via smartphone makes the shopping experience even smoother and more convenient.

Boosting end-of-year revenue for brands and retailers

Digital gift cards directly contribute to increased sales. Recipients often spend more than the card’s initial value, generating additional revenue for brands, with an average increase of 40% above the card’s amount.

Attracting new customers

Digital gift cards are also a powerful customer acquisition tool. Whether the recipient is discovering a new brand or the buyer becomes a potential new client, the gift card serves as an effective acquisition lever.

Successfully integrating digital gift cards for Christmas

A dedicated gift card team

Managing a gift card program requires a dedicated team, especially during the holiday season when traffic on the gift card ordering page is likely to surge. Tasks such as managing monetary flows, payments, troubleshooting, enhancing the solution, promoting and communicating, and ensuring security demand consistent effort.

To elevate the gift card beyond just a product and transform it into a marketing tool, it's crucial that the gift card team and marketing team work closely together for maximum efficiency and effectiveness. For instance, if a loyalty campaign involves sending a digital gift card via an email database, the gift card should only be generated if the recipient opens the email and clicks the link. This ensures the correct number of cards is created and adds an extra layer of security against fraud.

An optimal backoffice for the marketing team

To give the marketing team greater autonomy and flexibility, providing a well-designed, user-friendly backoffice interface is essential. A smooth backoffice experience will allow the marketing team to leverage digital gift cards as a true asset in their strategies, rather than slowing them down.

For example, if they want to use the digital gift card as a promotional tool, they should have quick and easy access to a tool that allows them to generate a set number of "free" gift cards, with the ability to choose an amount and an expiration date.

Additionally, the marketing team often defines KPIs to measure success. The backoffice should offer real-time, customizable reporting to help track the performance of digital gift cards, allowing the team to identify areas for improvement.

When to use gift cards in marketing strategies?

Digital gift cards offer brands and retailers numerous opportunities, whether for in-store or e-commerce campaigns. One of the main advantages of this tool is its omnichannel flexibility.

Targeting early buyers

This involves offering a limited-time discount directly on the gift card. For example, a brand's €50 gift card is available for €40, and a €100 card for €80, for a period of two weeks. Consumers save €10 on the first card and €20 on the second.

Ideally, this campaign begins in October and runs through mid-November to attract early holiday shoppers. The expiration date is another key factor. If the brand sets a one-year validity, the card can be used as a gift. However, if the expiry is set before the holidays—say December 23—shoppers are more likely to use it immediately in-store to purchase their Christmas gifts.

This second option boosts customer acquisition and increases the average basket size.

Attracting unbanked consumers for gift purchases

One group that often uses gift cards for "self-use" is the unbanked population. Due to their financial situation, these consumers have limited access to online shopping and its vast product selection.

There are two key ways to reach these consumers:

• Offering gift cards for purchase in physical stores via cash registers.
• Distributing physical gift cards through third-party retailers, such as tobacco shops and newsstands. This allows unbanked consumers to buy a gift card with cash, which they can then use to access the brand's e-commerce site and purchase gifts.

Reactivating inactive customers for holiday shopping

During the holiday season, brands often target their database of inactive customers as part of their loyalty strategy. This period is ideal for reactivation campaigns.

One effective technique for reactivating inactive customers is through the use of gift cards. A month or two before Christmas, a brand can launch an email campaign inviting customers to reconnect with the brand and explore its new products. To motivate them, the brand can offer a small-value gift card (e.g., €5 or €15, depending on the average basket size). The card's expiration date can also be set to encourage them to visit the store before Christmas, and perhaps even before the last-minute shopping rush.

Attracting consumers

In today's world, where consumers can easily access everything online, competition is becoming fiercer. The same goes for holiday gift shopping. The goal is to drive customers to our brand or store. Various strategies are employed, particularly during the holiday season, and digital gift cards can play a crucial role.

For example, a special Christmas contest could include a gift card as one of the prizes. This would encourage the winner to visit the store, either online or in person, to redeem the card.

Another approach could be offering a gift card with a purchase. For instance, a brand might offer a €10 gift card for every €100 spent, valid until December 24. This not only incentivizes the initial purchase but also encourages the customer to return and spend the gift card at a later time.

Acquiring new customers during the holiday season

The Christmas period presents a great opportunity to attract new customers. However, even when purchasing a gift for someone else, making that first purchase from a brand can be daunting. Thankfully, there are various actions that can be taken to encourage this.

To entice new customers and push indecisive shoppers to checkout, brands can run promotional campaigns. To make the promotion more impactful, they can replace traditional discount vouchers or e-coupons with a free digital gift card of a certain value.

In the case of e-commerce, to prevent cart abandonment—a common occurrence with new visitors—the marketing team can offer a digital gift card as a follow-up, encouraging customers to complete their purchase.

Similarly, to attract last-minute shoppers, the marketing team can highlight the convenience of ordering digital gift cards, a service that is especially appealing for e-commerce platforms that can’t guarantee timely delivery of physical items.

Reactivating former customers

The holiday season is also an opportunity for marketing teams to re-engage former customers who haven’t made a purchase in a while. These customers are also on the lookout for gifts. So why not launch an email campaign inviting them to visit the store and check out the latest changes and new products?

To further motivate them to return, offering a fixed-value digital gift card is an effective strategy. It serves as an early gift and an invitation to enjoy a pleasant shopping experience.

Encouraging loyalty program customers to make their holiday purchases

We all know that consumers are not loyal to just one brand. Today, most of us are enrolled in at least three loyalty programs, with some people subscribed to over ten. This reveals one key insight: just because a customer is part of a loyalty program doesn't mean they will choose that brand for their holiday shopping.

However, tools like the gift card can help steer customers towards a particular brand. But how?

Take the example of a gift card. Imagine a loyalty program where customers earn points for making purchases or engaging in brand-related activities. They can then redeem these points for rewards, including gift cards, through a catalog offered by the brand.

For the holiday season, a brand could reduce the number of points required to access a €10 gift card for a limited period. Instead of needing 5,000 points, customers would only need 3,000. Once again, the validity period can influence their behavior.

Alternatively, the brand could send out an email campaign offering a complimentary gift card to a carefully selected list of loyal customers.

Reassuring cautious online shoppers

Although e-commerce is taking an ever-increasing share of holiday shopping, some consumers remain wary of making online payments, especially on a brand’s website.

While many of their purchases will still be made in-store, why not offer a first step toward online shopping with a gift card?

Here, the gift card can be seen as a secure payment method. A card with a set amount of money that can be spent later at the brand’s stores or online. For the cautious shopper, the gift card feels safer than using a credit card. Even if a fraudster were to steal the gift card, they would only have access to the amount on the card.

In this case, it would be beneficial for brands to offer their gift cards for sale in-store as a "secure" payment method for online shopping. The ultimate goal is to introduce these customers to the website and its exclusive online product ranges.

Reaching a broader audience

Gift cards also allow brands to expand their customer base. By selling their e-gift cards on third-party platforms and through external distributors, brands can reach new audiences. The goal is to not rely solely on their own sales channels to maximize gift card revenue but to branch out into external sales avenues.

This could include various types of partners: marketplaces, loyalty program solutions, cashback platforms, corporate social responsibility programs, and incentive programs for HR departments.

Additionally, brands could offer their gift card programs to businesses and employee committees, further expanding their reach.

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