What are eCommerce Gift Cards & How to Use Them to Create Sales Urgency

Who and how does an eCommerce gift card or e-gift card help?

It helps a shopper remove confusion while selecting a perfect gift, attracts customers with a ‘pay now, select later’ option, facilitates businesses with more revenue, and expands the scope for branding.

Let’s explore the practical ways of creating and using digital gift vouchers for your online store.

What is an eCommerce gift card

An e-commerce gift card is a digital prepaid amount that a user can use for online shopping at a specific online shop, applicable to the entire product list.

For example, if a customer buys a $50 gift card from an online shop, the customer or the recipient will be eligible to spend the gift card to purchase any products from that shop, maybe or may not be subject to any deadline.

Yes, right, a gift card is an encashment facility.

Voucher-coupon-promocode-giftcard: the web of conversion

A voucher is basically like a gift card, you can use it as prepaid credit and apply this amount while paying. For example, if you have a $20 voucher, and now you are going to pay $100, the voucher amount will be added, and you will pay $80 from your wallet.

A coupon code is a digital code applied to get a personalized discount on certain products or services.

A promo code or promotional code is also a discount code made with letters and numbers.

And, a gift card is s prepaid shopping amount given/sold to a user, accessible in a further purchase.

As a whole, these codes and cards are a set of promotional features you can run to serve your marketing and revenue goals based on particular interests.

Why does your online business need gift cards

The fun fact is that a gift card is always pre-purchased. A gift card purchaser, in general, forwards it to someone else. Here, a regular customer is the targeted shopper of a gift card, and the recipient is the consumer.

Promote seasonal sales

When you apply your holiday marketing strategies, opportunities like e-gift cards can boost the seasonal sales to an extended level. 

Attract new customers

You can turn both the gift card purchasers and recipients into your regular customers by applying useful strategies.

A gift card recipient will later intend to shop more from your online store if you are able to deliver exceptional customer service.

Enhance brand loyalty

You can sell gift cards directly, but you can also offer gift cards to your loyal customers. This generous incentive will make your customers feel happy and help you gain more customers from referrals or word of mouth.

How to create an online gift card: the simplest process

When you offer a gift card to your customer, it works like a coupon code. You need to add a coupon code to your online store.

To sell an e-gift card, you need to add a product page to your website. You can also add coupons or discounts to a digital gift card.

A gift card needs to have visual appeal, informational clarity, and smart pricing. Don’t forget to create an ideal buyer persona to prepare for selling to the target customers.

How does a gift card work for the customers?

Let’s take a WooCommerce site as an example. 

In WooCommerce, these are the steps that a customer purchase and uses a gift card.

Customers-

1. Choose a gift card product
2. Alter quantity if needed
3. Go through the usual purchase process: Add to cart > cart > checkout > payment
4. Customers can access any of the options (on the checkout page): ‘send to me’ or ‘gift to someone else’
5. ‘Gift to someone else’ comes with two options: ‘send to one person’ or ‘send to different people’
6. Select ‘NOW’ or ‘LATER”
7. Provide the receiver’s email in terms of ‘gift to someone else’
8. Complete payment 

Best practices to promote gift vouchers to customers

Adding a gift card to your store is the basic. It can’t be sold multiple times unless your store’s products are worth selling. As a gift card typically connects two or more people, it can be a useful lead magnet.

A few actions that can expand the results of selling and promoting your digital gift vouchers.

Collect and categorize qualified leads

Customers who have never purchased or considered purchasing your products are less likely to gift someone your gift cards.

Whether it’s the marketing qualified leads or the sales qualified leads, the customers who have brand loyalty for you are the most targetable audience for your gift cards.

Conduct a converting email campaign

Gift cards are commonly used for special days like New Year, Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day, Christmas, and personal celebrations like birthdays or anniversaries. If your brand is in touch with your customers, you can easily reach out to them in a celebratory way during these days.

It’s easy to convince customers during holiday seasons, because most of the time, buyers are already looking to buy things for gifts. You can keep a list of prominent buyers in your email CRM, send them targeted emails with special holiday email campaigns.

Organize customer loyalty programs

Gift cards can be a broad practice to win customer loyalty. You can offer gift vouchers to the customers who regularly purchase from your store.

Think you are a regular customer of an online store. You buy a $100 gift card with a 40% discount. Later on, using that card, you can buy a $100 product, which may not offer any discounts.

Or, your brand can offer ‘free’ gift vouchers to generate more revenue. A customer with a $15 gift card will not buy within that amount, but more than that.

Engage through social shoutouts

Selling gift cards using social media is strategic but more result-centric. 

Represent your brand: to the people who are more into gifting. 

Create content: uphold the intensity of happiness sharing.  

Run ad campaigns: target people who keep gifting others.

Run a full-fledged sale campaign (Bonus)

You can use your digital gift coupons as a scope for promotional strategies. Customers might not purchase instantly. But you can retarget your returning customers using gift card promotions to make a step toward becoming your regular customers.

Wrap up

Adding gift cards to your online store creates a win-win situation for your business and customers. It enables the user to find simplified gifting while promoting your brand to the recipients. Digital gift vouchers, as an excellent scope of pre-purchased credits, grow your revenue. The sales urgency and seasonal sales frequency elevate your business’s promotional strength.