A Gift with Purchase (GWP) campaign is a cost-effective way to maintain desired price points and maximize sales, without devaluing your brand. When a business chooses to offer a gift as a part of a promotion, it is generally set for a limited period of time, to incentivize customers to act fast. Gifts come across as exclusive and limited, which intrigues potential and loyal customers alike.
How to Choose the Perfect Gift for a Gift-With-Purchase Campaign?
A successful GWP promotional campaign will encourage customers to buy more and buy now, to receive the coveted gift. It is important to strategically consider what kinds of gifts to offer your customers in order to achieve the intended upselling effect. This article will discuss why prepaid cards are an extremely valuable and desirable gift for any successful GWP campaign.
The Intrigue of Prepaid Cards
Ease, value and convenience are just a few words businesses have used to describe prepaid cards. Not only do these prepaid cards provide consumers with an enticing incentive, but due to their custom branding ability, they also act as a compelling promotional tool. They bring awareness to your brand and encourage consumers to do business with you as opposed to your competition. Prepaid cards are a flexible and convenient incentive for customers who are given complete and total control over their purchasing decisions, allowing them to walk away with merchandise they actually want.
If that was not enough to sell you on the idea of prepaid cards, consider the useful data you can receive from tracking prepaid cards. They allow for deep insight into consumers' shopping habits that the sale of goods cannot provide. This information can then be used to effectively build loyalty programs that target and create loyal customers in the long-run.
"Not only do these prepaid cards provide consumers with an enticing incentive, but due to their custom branding ability, they also act as a compelling promotional tool."
Customers Reaction
The key to a successful marketing campaign is ease. The easier it is for customers to participate in the promotion and redeem the rewards, the more likely a campaign will succeed. Unfortunately, with many companies today making it far too complicated to redeem rewards, this simple factor often gets overlooked. Oftentimes, customers will spend 20 minutes on the phone with a robot, forced to divulge personal information, only to wait another month to actually receive the reward. In the end, customers opt out of the reward due to over complication and lack of speed. Luckily, prepaid cards solve all of these problems and more, with their incredible ease of use. Customers can receive their prepaid cards at the time of purchase and can be redeemed whenever, making them one of the most in-demand incentives available.
"Customers can receive their prepaid cards at the time of purchase and can be redeemed whenever, making them one of the most in-demand incentives available."
Tips for a Successful Offering Prepaid Cards as Gifts
Too often, companies will run a GWP campaign without considering all of the necessary logistics to ensure a fruitful campaign. As with any campaign, businesses must follow the following guidelines to ensure the prepaid card gift is not just valuable but desired.
1. Timing is Everything
Strategically, it is best to launch a GWP campaign when you can leverage a competitive advantage. For bigger companies that are already successful during busy seasons, it would be best to offer the prepaid card incentive during slower months, to create a larger buying incentive. However, for smaller businesses, the busy season is the perfect time to offer this incentive to compete with the bigger companies, to turn consumers' attention to your offerings.
2. Ensure Appropriate Usage
Since you can customize prepaid cards with personalized artwork and branding, you can pretty much create a prepaid card for any occasion, but this does not mean you should. Some really effective use cases would be offering customers a prepaid card as a birthday gift or holiday promotion. However, be wary of using prepaid cards as a daily incentive, as this will diminish its exclusiveness and the urgency of acting fast to get the reward.
3. Promote Your Campaign
Oftentimes, businesses will decide to offer prepaid cards as a gift without putting enough attention into planning a marketing strategy alongside the campaign. Marketing is essential for any GWP campaign, as simply offering a promotion is not sufficient. Having some form of marketing or advertising to support your campaign, will go a long way in ensuring its success. Depending on the scale and budget of your campaign, you may consider investing in:
- A Cross-Channel Social Media Campaign
- Paid Display and Search Campaigns Using Keywords
- An Email Campaign for Loyal Customers
- Video Advertising
4. Streamline the Process
If the idea of offering prepaid cards is to ensure ease of use, then your businesses would want to ensure the process is as streamlined as possible. This means not making the customer jump through hoops to redeem the reward. Simply have the prepaid cards loaded and ready to hand off to consumers at the point of purchase. This way customers will not get frustrated with the activation process and will be more likely to do business with you again.
Prepaid cards are an incredibly valuable and enticing incentive on the market, for brands that can use them effectively. Berkeley can help your business create a personalized and branded prepaid card rewards programs for customers, today.
