4 Ways To Incentivize Gift Card Sales For Children

All week long, the Canadian POS Corporation Blog has analyzed the importance of selling gift cards in your store. As we’ve detailed, gift cards are sold all year long. You don’t need the holiday season to arrive in order to enjoy the benefits of having gift cards available as purchasable items at your place of business. In our last blog, we pointed out just how popular gift cards are among the younger generation.

And we do mean young! On GiftCards.com, Shelley Hunter explains that “elementary school-age kids are often invited to a number of birthday parties requiring parents to purchase an equivalent number of gifts for kids they may not know all that well. Busy parents may struggle to meet the demands of the birthday-driven social calendar and may overspend on gifts when rushing to buy them in a hurry.”

This is where selling gift cards as children’s gifts is such a wise choice. It’s not likely that most parents are completely aware of what the school friends of their children want as presents. Gift cards make the shopping experience a lot more convenient for parents shopping for friends of their kids. Hunter offers up a number of ideas for how you can incentivize customers to buy gift cards for children.

Here are four:

1. Create cool designs and denominations. “Offer multi-pack gift cards in kid-friendly dollar amounts ($25 to $50) and kid-friendly designs,” Hunter suggests. This particular tip is in keeping with her assertion that many parents usually stock up on gifts for children so that they can “shop the closet” when the time comes for their kids to attend birthday parties. Having a number of gift cards on hand will make the process all the more easier.

2. Come up with money-saving promotions. “Consider promotions such as ‘Buy three $25 gift cards and get a $5 discount,’ ‘Free birthday balloon with each gift card purchased,’ or ‘Matching greeting card 50% off when purchased with a gift card.’” It doesn’t matter who the customer is. If you can save that person some money, you’ll be a lot more likely to sell the product that you’re promoting.

3. Adequately train your employees to push gift cards to parents. “Train cashiers to ask shoppers if they have birthday parties or other celebrations coming up,” suggests Hunter, “Offer gift cards as a solution.” As always, it’s important to keep your customer base informed about your products. But asking such questions also shows that you’re looking to add value to the customer experience by offering solutions to problems.

4. Add value to the redemption process. “On the redemption side, make birthdays more exciting with offers such as, ‘Redeem gift card (store or bank-issued) on your birthday to save 10% off on your purchase’ or ‘Redeem a gift card during your birthday month for a $5 savings,’” suggests Hunter, “(Note that I’m not limiting the offer to closed-loop gift cards. Merchants should be welcoming and luring bank-issued gift card spenders into their locations as well.)”

To order gift cards to sell in your store, call Canadian POS Corporation at 1-877-748-2884 or email us at info@localhost.