GiftCard Partners Blog

We are getting such great feedback; We will now draw 2 winners! Each will win a $50.00 gift card of your choice! Do you use gift cards for health and wellness incentives, employee rewards, sales incentives, fundraising, loyalty programs, consumer promotions or safety rewards? If so, we’d love to hear how you are using your gift cards. We recently offered this survey to our eNewsletter subscribers and we had a huge turn-out of responses! We hope you’ll participate in part 2 of this survey… You’ll be presented a maximum of 5 required questions. Should you complete the survey and submit your gift card usage success story, you'll be entered into our drawing for a chance to win 1 of 2  $50.00 gift cards. The drawing winners can select from The Children’s Place, Brinker (1 card for 4 great restaurants: Chili's, The Macaroni Grill, On The Border and Maggiano’s Little Italy), Charming Shoppes (1 card for 3 great fashion retailers: Fashion Bug, Lane Bryant and Catherine's) and CVS/pharmacy cards. GiftCard Partners will post the gift card usage results on our website.
Click here to take our survey and submit your gift card success story.
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My father-in-law just turned 80! What did we give him for his birthday? An iPhone…well, pretty much...it’s complicated. Turns out you can’t buy a phone for someone due to contracts, phone number transitions, etc. So we printed a picture of an iPhone and gave him gift cards to buy his phone. What’s my point? He is 80 and he still loves his gadgets. Now, Dads love their gadgets within gadgets, like virtual and mobile gift cards.  “Most Dads love their gadgets and now family members can give unique virtual or mobile gift cards with personalized messages that stay with them on their mobile device,” said Doug Schneider, CEO, Transaction Wireless. “Social gifting is gaining in popularity and Facebook postings give loved ones a public forum to express their feelings and appreciation for dad.” Employers can embrace holidays like Father’s Day and make a Dad feel special with spot rewards and gifting virtual and mobile gift cards. High performance, corporate recognition, safety, sales motivation and achievements…there are many ways to commemorate your employees’ fatherhood.

It’s undisputable that gift cards are the workplace incentive of choice. Here are the answers to a few questions we are hearing around using gift cards as incentives or rewards for workplace safety programs.

GCP’s
Vice President of  Sales,
Diane Freeland,
is back from Loyalty 360’s annual Loyalty Expo & shares the top discussions that caught her attention.
Social media and customer care: Social media has altered the role of customer service in an organization, from primarily a support function to an extension of marketing. Brands can listen to what customers are saying, they can be proactive and more widely solicit product or service feedback, offer incentives like gift cards or points for sharing product information. Many of GCP’s clients are taking social media seriously,
1-800-Flowers was one of the first retailers to use Facebook's platform. For more details on social media & customer care, check out:
How to Integrate Customer Service Into Social Media Marketing. It also includes 12 Ways Social Media Enhances Customer Service and 5 Ways to Measure Social Media Customer Service.
What’s next for loyalty programs? Are traditional points based loyalty programs dead?  The consensus was NO. However, significantly different redemption options need to be brought into the mix with gift cards, merchandise, and travel rewards (e.g intrinsic rewards like virtual game currency). We heard some interesting discussion around personalizing loyalty rewards for individual participants. Traditional loyalty programs offer everyone the same reward options; when rewards are personalized it starts a dialogue and treats the customer to rewards they’ve selected versus what is offered across the program. What if customers can select or “favorite” categories of rewards like gift cards for children’s clothes, brands of merchandise like “Apple”, and travel customized to “Inns on the east coast”? The learnings from programs like this could go a long way for the development of loyalty programs that listen!
Mobile Segmentation Marketing: Another interesting way to listen and respond to loyal customers; shaping customer personas based on their mobile usage. This allows thoughtful marketers to send the right kinds of messages to the right users and reward for loyalty via the right technology. The goal is to better increase the value of customer relationships based on how customers use their mobile phones, like m-certs (mobile gift cards). Carlson Marketing gave some great examples of how they are engaging in this strategy for the Hallmark Crown Rewards loyalty program; "Interactions turned into transactions". For more insights to mobile technology and gift cards, read GCP's article:
Why Mobile & Virtual Gift Cards are Becoming a Way of Life GCP will be launching our new website in the coming week, keep a look out:
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