GiftCard Partners Blog

This year holiday gift card spending on both plastic and digital gift cards will top all previous records with sales expecting to reach over $31 billion!  Gift cards have shed their reputation of being impersonal and have emerged as the perfect practical gift item for millions of holiday shoppers and are the most requested holiday gift for the 8th year in a row. Shoppers are expected to spend an average of $47.87 a card, up 6% over last year.  Since the
National Retail Federation began tracking customers holiday purchasing intentions in 2003, the total spend on gift cards has increased 83%. “Consumers young and old want to find the best way possible to create a happy holiday experience for their loved ones, and gift cards are a great option every time.”  Gift cards are a go-to gift for consumers of all ages; adults 65+ will spend the most on gift cards, while young adults will spend the least.  In addition, men will spend almost 10% more than women on gift card purchases. The following charts provide more insight into the 2014 NRF survey results, check out more
here.
About the Survey The NRF 2014 Gift Card Spending Survey was designed to gauge consumer behavior and shopping trends related to the winter holidays. The survey polled 6,593 consumers and was conducted for NRF by Prosper Insights & Analytics, November 3-10, 2014. The consumer poll has a margin of error of plus or minus 1.2 percentage points.

Gamifying your employee loyalty program can be a great way to engage your workforce and collect data to strengthen your team. Here are a few ways to make your gamification program the best it can be.

Team communication is key. The better a team can communicate, even non-verbally, the better that team can work together in any situation. Being able to pick up on signals and non-verbal tendencies can help co-workers in critical situations like client meetings or big presentations. So, how do you expedite your teams bonding and ensure everyone gets to know each other and gets comfortable? Put everyone in an equally uncomfortable position doing a fun(ny) activity like stand-up comedy, improv or karaoke. Get everyone nervous, so their teammates learn their nervous habits. That way when they are in front of the big client and may not have the best answer, their teammates know, seamlessly, to jump in. Creating fun team building activities also helps teammates get to know each other outside the office. It gets everyone loose and talking to each other about something other than work. Building team bonds makes client meetings stronger and the potential for sales and upsells greater.  Improving team communication can translate to improving your bottom line. For more information on how to improve team communication through comedy check out this
video from Inc.com.

LoyaltyOne recently took a deep dive into incentive programs and what exactly attracted millennials to them. Their study found that the majority, falling into a range of 18-29 years old, identified in-store experience as a top factor when it came to joining grocery-store reward programs. These in-store experiences also seem to go hand-in-hand with health and nutrition.

Last week GiftCard Partners senior management attended Money 20/20, the biggest industry event surrounding payments and payment technology. The team learned quite a bit on the trip about what the latest technology could mean for how consumers pay for goods. A study released by
Accenture, put an interesting spin on payments that can sometimes can get lost in the latest technology and the cutting edge applications: the consumer perspective. The ongoing challenge in the consumer payments industry has been consumer confidence and adoption. Every wallet, app and mobile device is useless if consumers aren't willing to put their personal information in and use the technology. In the Accenture
survey of over 4,000 North American consumers, they expect to use traditional consumer payments methods like cash and credit 66% of the time, but that drops to only 54% by 2020. While the number is modest, it shows a trend over time that indicates consumer adoption is trending the way of mobile and virtual payment options. The survey results also indicate that although there are the typical fears about security, consumers are also interested in payments choices. Consumer choice overcoming consumer trepidation is the ultimate formula to real mobile and virtual payment adoption. Consumer impact is the only thing that will allow the consumer payments industry to truly turn the corner.