Gift Cards: the Shopping Centre’s Most Versatile Tool 🎁 Since their start, retailer gift cards have been the easy go-to gift for people shopping for relatives, friends, and colleagues. Which was great if you know exactly where stocks your brother’s favourite cut of jeans or where your co-worker prefers to shop. The lack of flexibility negatively impacted these retailers: while they would keep the breakage, they wouldn’t benefit from that all-important 40% increase on average spend that accompanies purchases made with gift cards.
Gift Cards: the Shopping Centre’s Most Versatile Tool 🎁
Since their start, retailer gift cards have been the easy go-to gift for people shopping for relatives, friends, and colleagues. Which was great if you know exactly where stocks your brother’s favourite cut of jeans or where your co-worker prefers to shop. The lack of flexibility negatively impacted these retailers: while they would keep the breakage, they wouldn’t benefit from that all-important 40% increase on average spend that accompanies purchases made with gift cards.
Security
And the hits for retailer cards kept coming. Several major UK retailers unfortunately went into administration including high-street mainstays Comet, HMV, Arcadia, and Debenhams – just to name a few. For gift card holders, this resulted in an abrupt loss: they were unable to use nor recuperate the funds on their card. This unsurprisingly resulted to a direct hit to gift cards as a whole, with negative press sounding off on the risk of would-be customers wasting their hard earned cash.
Enter multi-retailer shopping centre gift cards. Just as with single-retailer cards, shopping centre gift cards are gifts that suit everyone: after all, they’re always the perfect size. The beauty of a shopping centre card vs retailer-specific is that the card recipient has choices. They will always find a shop that they enjoy. Shopping centre gift cards therefore easily suit all genders and ages and, should one or two retailers go into administration, this has a limited impact on the card holder who can still use it through the rest of the centre.
Business Reward Schemes
Another key point in favour of multi-retailer cards is that they're a great way for local businesses to reward their staff while also supporting a local business. Instead of firms rewarding their hard-working teams with a small £50 bonus on their payslip (which generally goes unnoticed and usually pays bills) or a Starbucks gift cards (which may not suit everyone, especially those large call centres), smart employers can choose gift cards to the local shopping centre. This reward will feel more like a gift, and the employees will be more likely to treat themselves to something they wouldn't have bought otherwise, while also raising their awareness of the shops at their local centre.
Dare I Mention the Dreaded ‘C’ Word: Covid
2020 and 2021 have been difficult years for businesses across the globe, with shopping centres force to close and tightly regulate their customer services upon reopening. For many sectors, selling gift cards during the lockdowns allowed for a continued source of revenue to tide them over until reopening. This reality has made it more important than ever that shopping centres maximise their gift card offering across channels to leverage their communities’ desire to support local businesses. Now more than ever, large corporations will turn to their local shopping centre for gift card rewards and incentives, providing in turn, larger footfall and additional spend for the very businesses that need it.
Why to go Giftify
If you are a shopping centre that has yet to introduce a gift card scheme, please contact us. We have different solutions to suit all centres, and clear marketing support and KPI reporting to maximise your spend. Are you a smaller centre? We have several solutions that will be commercially viable for you, including vending kiosks. We have business developers and support staff located throughout Europe. Our diverse, multilingual team is ready to speak to you with local insights and a variety of options to discuss.
Article written by Michelle Blake, Business Development Manager: UK and Scandinavia
Originally published on LinkedIn: July 2021
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