GiftCard Partners Blog

Are you running a customer loyalty points program and looking for the right FIT for your customer rewards? Selecting the right gift cards to include in your program goes beyond strong brands and lots of locations. The gift card brands you offer should not only be a category leader, but they should innovate by facilitating a perfect fit for their customers, and in this day-and-age; they should provide social experiences that enhance the buying experience. Last September,
Charming Shoppes launched Fashion Genius™ for Lane Bryant® and its sister brands Catherines®, Fashion Bug® and Sonsi®.  The Fashion Genius™ includes breakthrough “fit and style technology that takes the guesswork out of shopping online, enabling plus size women to turn personalized recommendations into fully styled, head-to-toe outfits.” Now couple that technology leadership with offering a mobile shopping experience which integrates PayPal, adds customer crowd-sourcing and shopper collaboration on social media platforms, and; Charming Shoppes offers your loyalty program participants more than a cutting edge gift card reward, it’s a seamless customer experience. Read more about
Charming Shoppes' Fashion Genius and their latest advancements in social shopping technology.

For many employers, making the connection between “games” at work and increased productivity can be a tough leap to make. But evidence of the success of gamification increasingly piles up and now there are many corporate success trends we can point to. Yet, the term “gamification” and the motivation technique is becoming a cornerstone of corporate and employee incentive programs. Snowfly, an employee recognition and incentive company reports over 2,700,000 hits on Google for the term, over 150 million of their corporate performance games have been played, and they expect gamification to be a 2.8 billion dollar business by 2015.1 In
Snowfly’s 16 Key Findings for Success white paper, they tout that their workplace games have a 93% participant approval rate within incentive and employee performance programs, yet the national approval average for traditional programs hovers around 45%.2 Many more key discoveries and lessons learned can be found in the
white paper. In
Incentive Research Foundation’s (IRF) recent top trends webinar, they list gamification as #4 out of their
12 Trends in Rewards and Recognition for 2012. IRF white paper outlines Gartner Group’s prediction “that by 2015, half of all managed innovation processes will include game mechanics, and that by 2014, 70% of all the Global 2000 organizations will have at least one “gamified application” in place.3 The future seems quite bright for this innovative interactive method of motivating, incenting, and rewarding. Are you using such techniques yet? Sources: 1 & 2:
Gamification after Twelve Years and 150 Million Games: 16 Key Findings for Success 3:
IRF Trends &
Gartner’s report: Gartner Says By 2015, More Than 50 Percent of Organizations That Manage Innovation Processes Will Gamify Those Processes

In less than 2 weeks, GCP’s own Ed Shulkin and Deb Merkin will attend the Prepaid industry's biggest event. They’ll take in host keynotes, sponsors & exhibitions, and info sessions about the latest products and solutions in prepaid technologies and we’ll report the highlights back to you on this blog. Here are some helpful Prepaid Expo links: -        
Download the agenda -        
Check out the executive sessions -        
Prepaid Keynotes -        
What’s in store Check back next week to check out our Prepaid Expo round up.

I had the pleasure of attending the Incentive Research Foundation (IRF) 12 Trends in Rewards & Recognition webinar last week. It was a truly well put together and extremely professional event; I don’t tend to take these attributes for granted these days. And the
post webinar white paper download is filled with survey results, studies, insights, economic climate conditions, mobile technology implications in the workplace, the latest engagement techniques, and so much more. During the webinar, they noted that they’d release 2 new studies about the use of prepaid cards as incentives and rewards and
11 new studies and white papers on the use of rewards, recognition, and motivational meetings in the workplace. Here are IRF’s top 12 Trends, do take the time to download the white paper; it’s a must read for employers involved with engagement, motivation, recognition, and rewards…the things that keep your business ticking!

We’ve done much writing on the popularity of incentives and utilizing “healthy gift cards” within workplace health and wellness programs, but one of the benefits of doing so is often overlooked by hiring managers: Recruiting and how attractive these programs are when interviewing. Healthcare costs are a top concern for all American workers. A recent Towers Watson study found that 73% of employees are concerned about paying more for out-of-pocket health costs and co-pays and 53% of survey participants said they “would be willing to trade a portion of their pay in return for more generous benefits.” This certainly highlights the importance of healthcare initiatives to the potential employee. Being able to communicate that you seriously heed these concerns, and are addressing them by adding and expanding employee programs and incentives to offset costs, gives you a competitive advantage when recruiting and hiring. Health and wellness programs aren’t just a feather in your benefits cap, or a way to decrease healthcare premiums over time, but; they are also an increasingly important component to then competitiveness of your benefits package as a whole. For more of our blogs about corporate health and wellness and gift card incentives,
check out our health and wellness blogs. To learn how CVS/pharmacy gift cards are utilized in corporate programs,
check out our CVS Bulk Gift Card site. Source: Employee Benefits News:
Workers willing to trade pay for benefits