Selling Gift Cards and Experiences: The Basics

So, you’re all set up, now what?

Great stuff, you’ve done it. You’re all set up and ready to sell gift cards and experiences. You’ve got your webshop, and you and the staff know how to redeem them. Now what? Well, follow these basics to make gift cards fly for your business.

Make accessing your webshop super easy

Make sure the link to your webshop is easy to find across all your digital channels. Your website? Put it as a navigation link and give it a prominent section on your homepage. Most of your users will visit your webshop on a mobile or tablet, so put it as a link in the bio section on your social media as well.

This isn’t to say you should give it precedence over your main website, but remember that your webshop is probably one of the few ways, if not the only way, to get actual revenue online. It gives you access to real life paying customers who aren’t restricted by your location or opening hours.

Set up a custom domain. It helps with all this to have a domain that’s nice to read, makes sense with your brand, easy to say and remember. Toggle provides a default domain that you can use right away, but it’s a bit...Toggley. You can set up a custom domain so that the link you communicate gives a much nicer experience all round.

In store

Your current customers are the most likely candidates to buy your gifts for their friends, so it’s vital that it’s really obvious that you sell gift cards.

There are all sorts of ways you can do it. Posters, signs, a card on the table, a note handed over with the receipt, verbally as part of your servers’ usual spiel - however you do it and whatever works for your business, it needs to be unmissable each and every time someone visits that you sell gift cards and experiences.

Make it part of your strategy

This is probably the most important bit. Gift cards are a bit of a dream. It’s pre-sold revenue, the strongest kind of new customer recruitment, and then when they come in it’s likely they’ll spend more than the value of their gift. To really see the benefits, it needs to be embedded in both your marketing and operations.

The key in your marketing is to keep telling people about it, online and in store. After the launch of a gift card it’s easy to leave it be, but it’ll sell much better if it’s continually part of your narrative. To keep it interesting for your customers and to give yourself new content, you can push gift cards based on upcoming days (Valentines, Mother’s Day, Christmas etc.), as well as a periodic reminder that it’s great for birthdays and anniversaries - just don’t let people forget it exists!

What about operationally? Always consider how you can package up what you sell as an experience. For some businesses, what to sell as an experience is really clear. For others, not so. But remember, an experience is just a gift card with a value on it, but it’s marketed for a fixed thing - and the recipient never sees the value of that thing. This gives you unlimited scope to take something, or a few things that you do, package it up and give it a name. For example, if you’re a cafe, why not sell a ‘brunch for two’. This includes a meal, drink and a pastry for two people. It’s something you already do, but the person buying it and the person receiving it feel as though it’s a step beyond a normal gift card.

So, there you have it. Make your webshop unmissable on digital, unmissable in store, unmissable in your marketing and ingrained in how you do things.

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