Ways you can use social media to sell and promote your gift cards.
Gift cards can boost sales during the holidays and help you generate revenue through the year – but all of your competitors are going to be competing with you for a big slice of the pie this season. Of course, you can place the cards by the registers and put marketing materials in your store – but are you doing anything your competitors aren’t?
Here are four ways you can use social media to sell and promote your gift cards.
Ask A Question
Do a hash tag contest on Twitter or a trivia contest on Facebook to help generate conversations. From the participants, choose one person at random to receive a free $5 gift card. When the card is redeemed, the winner is very likely to spend more than the value of the card and will most likely tell his/her friends about the experience he/she had with your business. Just make sure you follow Facebook’s promotion guidelines.
Hold A Secret Giveaway
People love to be part of something exclusive. Encourage your fans and followers to purchase gift cards with a “secret password” giveaway on a consistent day of the week. You could name it Terrific Tuesday, Super Saturday or Thank You Thursday. Choose your day and a catchy name. On that day each week, release a password for a free $5 gift card awarded with any gift card purchase and when the customer says the secret password. For example:
“Hey! It’s Super Saturday! For being our Facebook fan, you’ll get a FREE $5 gift card with any gift card purchase when you show up and say ‘geranium’ to our cashiers! See you soon!”
Make Them Find It
Hide a loaded gift card somewhere around town. Once it’s been carefully secured, begin giving hints about its whereabouts on your social media pages. As you continue to release clues, you’re reminding your fans that you have gift cards and you’re also increasing interest in your audience. Once the gift card is found, the winner must post or tweet a photo of the location before the card can be used. This will let the rest of those who are looking know it’s been found. But don’t stop there. Tell your fans to keep watching for the next contest.
Sign them up
Create an email marketing sign-up form on your Facebook page. If you’re not sure how to do that, you can use any one of a number of third-party applications that will walk you through the steps. Promise to give a $50 gift card to one lucky winner who signs up for your email campaign during a certain time frame. You can then take those email addresses and add them to your database. The first email campaign you should send? That’s right, gift cards!
As a business person, you’re want to know how you can judge the success of these campaigns. Have they improved your bottom line? Well, if you’re using retail software like NCR CounterPoint the answer is easy! Run a comparison report! Check sales for the item, or the time period last year or the year before or the year before that and this year. This is the simplest of reports. You may want to see if the store’s overall sales increased, and if there was any marked change in which items – other than gift cards – sold the best. This is just one example of the many options NCR CounterPoint has to help you run your business profitably.
Talk to you soon. ~Norma