Top 11 Gift Card Mistakes Online Retailers Make And How To Avoid Them

eCommerce gird cards are the most remarkable marketing tools in this day and age. They serve your business well, from filling your pockets to spreading your word.

However, some merchants make gift card mistakes and never maximize their profits.

The gift voucher business is a serious investment. It demands strategizing and planning to penetrate the already saturated marketplace.

Also, the right approach to solving problems with gift cards involves being proactive, transparent, and customer-focused.

So, I have come up with a list of the top 11 gift card mistakes that sellers commonly make, along with some takeaways and tips to avoid them.

Top Gift Card Mistakes And Their Possible Solutions

A gift card program for an eCommerce store boosts revenue, expands the customer base, and increases store visibility. Avoid these 11 gift card mistakes to maximize customer satisfaction and revenue potential.

1. Waiting For The Shopping Season To Offer Gift Cards

Often marketers wait for the holiday/festive seasons to sell gift cards. It is one of the most common gift card mistakes they make. Although gift card sales soar during this time, they are not merely seasonal greetings.

Gift cards are alternative gifting options that sell throughout the year as there are plenty of celebratory events other than the coming of Father Christmas.

Bottom line: Digital gift cards are your sales promoter all around the year.

By limiting your gift voucher business to festive seasons, you have missed out on numerous opportunities over the years.

What’s the solution?

Plan your gift card strategy in a way that helps you promote the business all year long. Gift cards are anyway the preferred giftings for birthdays, anniversaries, Valentine’s Day, and more.

Focus on –

• Create attractive gift cards for various occasions and let your customers customize them.
• A reliable point-of-sale (POS) system that supports a gift card management program should be the priority of your business.
• Social Media (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest)-To receive the best results, you should prepare beautiful and eye-catching pictures and let them hook customers.

2. Complex Card Redemption Process

Selling a gift card is only half the job; redeeming it makes the full circle.

Merchants are so focused on increasing gift card sales that they often neglect the interface required to smoothly redeem their generated cards and give the promised discount or benefit to the recipient.

A complex card redemption process can promote contempt among customers and visitors, and it can easily damage your brand’s reputation and reduce your profits.

What’s the solution to this gift card mistake? 

Use a gifting solution with a centralized system for redeeming your gift cards. Also, sell gift certificates with QR codes or barcodes for faster redemption. 

3. Selling Gift Cards Without Promotion

“What’s Seen Is Sold.”

Visibility is one of the key elements to ensuring optimum product sales. It requires marketers to expose their target audiences to the product as often as possible, which increases the likelihood of them recalling the product.

Several businesses sell gift cards without proper marketing. It is one of the most overlooked gift card mistakes.

Essentially, like any other product, gift cards also require a promotional campaign.

What’s the Solution?

It’s all about letting your customers know that you sell gift cards with attractive offers. You can use both online and offline methods of gift card promotion such as blog posts, Youtube videos, ads, social media marketing, email marketing, etc.

4. Not Using Appealing Gift Card Designs

Another one of the gift card mistakes that marketers make is undermining presentability.

Your gift voucher business can be a goldmine by simply making your cards gift-worthy.

It is found that under-investment in gift card designs is one of the top issues that can impact the performance of your gift voucher system.

The Cost-focused groups often attempt to save money by investing in a single design and rarely updating it. However, consumers demand appealing and relevant cards that they can gift.

Designs are best managed by groups that understand their customers and are willing to drive their organizations to invest in birthday, holiday, and other sales-worthy designs.

Audit your existing cards monthly or quarterly to ensure that your gift certificate system has interesting and relevant designs. 

What’s the Solution?

Beautiful gift card templates and gift card design/customization tools are the solutions you need. Themed and customized gift cards templates attract the consumer more than simple text-based gift cards.

The best gift card  and carrier designs tend to be:

• Attractive
• Consistent with the merchant brand pieces
• In alignment with a merchant’s customer demographics
• A representation of the occasion for which they are given
• Unique in some way(s)

Make your gift certificates ‘Gift-Ready’. Design and packaging should be presentable to serve the purpose of purchase.

It isn’t necessary to use cute and colorful packaging boxes or bow-ties and ribbons. Digital gift cards don’t need them. All they require is the beautifully-themed gift card templates to serve the purpose.

5. Not Providing Coupons/Discounts To Attract Customers

Some marketers regard investing time and money in a coupon strategy as a waste. They are unaware that egift cards are the fastest growing segment of the $160 billion gift card market. (Source: Incisiv)

Marketers are still unaware of the fact that customers love lucrative discounts. People often do comparison shopping because they want to get the product at the best possible rate with additional benefits.

So, not providing appropriate discounts on gift cards is a big mistake.

What’s the Solution?

The solution is simple: Offer coupons and discounts on digital gift cards to entice new sales-ready leads, convert visitors into customers, sell non-selling products, and reduce cart abandonment rates.

Along with discounts, have different pricing options to make it convenient for customers to buy gift cards in their budget. For example, you can allow customers to select their own price for gift coupons or give them a range of prices to choose from.

Provide enticing discounts on your digital gift cards to bring the customer to your store. Inform your potential business leads and customers on social platforms about the offers on the gift card to increase your ROI.

6. Limited Options to Deliver or Send Gift Cards

Marketers fail in making a gift card sale because they don’t provide a sufficient number of delivery options to their customers, which is one of the most common gift card mistakes that reduce the likelihood of converting your customer.

When it comes to selling a gift card online, the reach is virtually unlimited. Yet, merchants expect customers to share their cards instead of having gift certificate systems for automated distribution.

What’s the solution?

The solution is easy – Offer multiple delivery options. Let your customers choose the best-suited delivery option to receive their gift cards. Convenience is the key to customer happiness.

Offer your customers at least three delivery options on the gift card to increase the card value and to make your customers satisfied with your services. Allow your customers to choose any of the delivery options

• Email gift card PDFs and banners
• Deliver the gift card to their doorstep
• Enable them to download the link from your site
• Send digital cards via WhatsApp, Facebook, & other social media.
• Send gift coupons via text using SMS integrations

7. Reasonable Expiry Dates

Not all gift cards customer purchase will be immediately redeemed. Some recipients may take a few days, weeks, or even longer to cash in on the benefits.

Imagine the disappointment of users when the gift cards they have been saving for a rainy day turns out to be expired.

‘What good is a gift if it expires? 

Gift card mistakes like these are taking good business away. Not everyone can adhere to the expiration dates you decide for their gift vouchers.

What’s the Solution?

Extend expiration dates or eliminate them altogether to give customers more time to redeem gift cards.

Or you can set product-wise expiration dates and define a longer expiration period for specific gift cards. The aim should be to help recipients use the card value at their convenience.

8. Limited Payment Options

Similar to the case with delivery options, limited payment methods available also affect your buyers’ buying decisions. It is a gift card mistake that directly affects conversion rates.

Not all buyers are comfortable with the same payment method. And having no alternative payment methods will only force your customers to abandon you and leave.

It’s not limited to gift voucher systems, as a rule, you should offer multiple payment methods that customers are familiar with.

Bottom Line: Lack of payment alternatives reduces the conversion rates.

What’s the Solution?

Providing Multiple Payment options is the solution. You must include at least three different payment options: Debit/Credit cards, Net Banking, WooCommerce Wallet, etc.

Use a combination of both local and international payment options for optimizing the checkout experience. For example, if you are selling to US based-customers, PayPal is a must-have payment gateway.

9. Lack of Personalization and Customization

Lack of personalization and customization in gift cards refers to the absence of options for customers to personalize their gift card designs or messages. This can be a missed opportunity to add a personal touch to the gift-giving experience.

People prefer personalization. They want the gifts to be tailored to their vision so the recipients can feel special. The cookie-cutter approach toward gift card design doesn’t sell as much.

What’s the Solution?

By providing customization features, such as allowing customers to upload personal photos, write personalized messages, or choose from various design templates, you can enhance the emotional connection between the sender and recipient.

Personalized gift cards create a more memorable and meaningful gift, making the recipient feel valued and appreciated, and ultimately increasing customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Here is an example of an eCommerce gift cards solution that let users personalize their cards with custom messages, delivery dates, and background images.

10. Missing Out On Online B2B Programs

It’s strange how most companies haven’t yet adopted digital gift cards for corporate gifting purposes.

Companies often wonder if they should give their employees special gifts at festivals and achievements to boost their morale. But they are still stuck in the same traditional gifting methods.

What’s the Solution?

Use digital gift cards for Corporate/industrial giftings. Since gift cards are already so convenient, they will also make your employee happier because they’ll be free to use them as per their preferences and needs. Corporate gift cards often include Food/Beverage coupons, shopping vouchers, etc.

11. Following A Rigid Gift Card Marketing Approach

You might say that you’ve always been aware of all the above mistakes and are doing pretty well with your gift card marketing strategy. Also, you might be enjoying the ultimate benefits of selling gift cards.

But thinking that all your efforts and practices are correct and becoming rigid in your marketing approach is the biggest mistake that you can make as a marketer.

Gift card trends and related-government policies are often under regular transitions, just like Google’s algorithm updates. So you cannot afford to design the gift card program once and then enjoy it forever. Be careful if you’ve been doing it for long. It’s time now to update your strategies.

In The End!

I have discussed the top 11 gift card mistakes and their solutions in this article. Also, this list will help you strategize a marketing strategy for selling gift cards and take your business to the next level.

As a marketer, it is desirable to avoid the aforementioned mistakes to run the gift card business smoothly on your eCommerce store. These automatically generated WooCommerce digital gift cards that will give your store a sale that you must be dreaming of.