GiftCard Partners Blog

Since gift cards are given as gifts, incentives and employee rewards, they are often thought of by retailers and merchants as a customer acquisition tool. Let’s say a customer doesn’t shop at a particular retailer or merchant often or at all. Yet a family member, friend or employer gives a particular brand based on it meshing well with the recipients’ needs. This gift card now becomes a new customer acquisition tool or a customer loyalty tool for the retailer. BUT, are retailers also thinking of their own gift cards as a tool to lower operating costs? When your customers use debit and credit cards for their purchases, the burden of the transaction fees falls on that retailer. There are no fees when your customers utilize their closed-loop gift cards in your own name. The impressive numbers add up when you think of the difference your gift cards can make when selling them by the hundreds and thousands in the B2B market. GiftCard Partners’s customers buy multi-millions of dollars in face value gift cards annually across all our retail brands. Those are all consumers using your gift cards versus credit or debit payment card options that rack up fees charged to you. Check out
First Data’s Perspective: The Evolution of Gift Card Strategy to see how retailers and merchants are re-evaluating their cost of payment acceptance at their POS locations.

Although the roots of the term “social incentives” goes back to the positive feelings humans gain when interacting with friends and peers; the term and concept has been leveraged in the workplace with great success. Historically, social incentives include the positive feedback one receives from peers, and even the presence of friends can be considered a social incentive. In the workplace, it has been proven that the presence of friends affects worker’s attitude, behavior and their levels of productivity. Employers can help forge new friendships and relationships in the workplace by formalizing social incentives as part of their ongoing motivation, recognition and rewards programs. Employers would thereby use the concept of social incentives as a way to encourage teams of coworkers to work together for common goals. Teams, cross-functional teams or randomly assembled  groups can join forces in a health and wellness program to collectively improve a workplace health and wellbeing outcomes, while driving individuals’ positive behaviors, keeping participants engaged and ultimately, drive results. Where’s the proof? In the article Increase Participation with Social Incentives, by Wellsource; it is reported that a rate of 64% participation was garnered for individuals on a team, versus 44% participation for those in the same program, with the same incentive, but without being part of a team. Now add a carrot like gift cards for successful participation, reaching milestones, and continued engagement and you are employing a well-rounded idea to keep your programs fresh. Why gift cards? Rewarding with a gift card like
The Cheesecake Factory or
Subway and the teams can dine together or get healthy take-out together to further develop the Comradery created by your program. Are you encouraging teams to work together for common goals and individual productivity?
Source: Wellsource: Increase Participation with Social Incentives

A recent Inc.om article calls NOW the time to reward employees, but they state, “If the economy gets better and job prospects improve, you may need to offer more incentives to keep your best employees”. It’s indisputable that as the economy revives, so will job opportunities to your employees and your competitors will be vicious when it comes to recruiting the best your company has to offer. Showing your staffers how much they matter is critical to TOP employee retention. GCP’s comments about how gift cards meet the 3 views of this article follow each Inc.

If you are immersed in the world of employee motivation, recognition and rewards; you’ve been hearing a lot about gamification: a business tool to integrate key techniques and mechanics into the workplace via “games”. Simply put, integrating interactive games as a tool within training or incentive programs improves employee engagement, motivation and productivity. GCP’s gift cards are well engrained in such programs as game points can be accumulated to select a really useful “prize”, like lunches at
SUBWAY, Health and Beauty items at
CVS/pharmacy, high quality, trend forward, and professional fashions from
The Limited…GCP’s gift cards are carefully selected for B2B programs like employee rewards. GCP’s recent blogs lead to gobs of the evidence that gamification should be looked at seriously within incentive programs,
Incentive Experts Point to Gamification as Top Incentive Trend,
Snowfly’s 16 Key Findings for Success white paper,
IRF’s 12 Trends in Rewards and Recognition for 2012,
Gamification Keeps Employees Engaged and Brand Image Strong…but this blog offers you a deep dive into the mechanics of gamification, data on participation levels, performance and reward successes, and what you can expect long term. Take a deep dive into gamification with “
Snowfly’s Gamification in the Workplace: 15 Key Discoveries”, by Dr. Brooks Mitchell. His work has been published and referred to in hundreds of publications, including Forbes, Wall Street Journal, Fortune, and the New York Times.

It should be of no surprise that mobile payment was a choice topic at this year’s Prepaid Expo, but as purveyors of the B2B portion of retail sales; how will we get to mobile payment? Retailers and merchants are living (or about to live) the latest technology and game changing concepts about the consumer waving their mobile device to pay. But the B2B portion of the market still has major issues to overcome. The questions that the Prepaid Expo asks ring loud in order to capture consumers and also ring true for your B2B customers and subsequent end-consumers: What will be frictionless in your environment? What will bring the greatest value? What will be the best authentication? What's the best way to reduce cost? How do you make prepaid product more relevant and valuable to cardholder before, during, after the payment transaction? Interesting quote from Bill Gates about the future: "We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten."--Bill Gates Mobile buying is inevitable, but are you considering B2B gift card sales in your mobile prepaid strategy? If not, when will you shape your change? Read up on the
Prepaid Expo’s Live from Prepaid Expo: The Future of Prepaid & Mobile