Get Better Insight into Your Core Target Markets by Offering Online Gift Cards
Every marketing strategy your business employs requires insight and data analysis. It’s hard to understand what drives consumer behavior without knowing the consumers. If you can’t track spending and customer behavior, then you have to wait and hope for sales instead of driving sales. But if your company offers consumable products and services that are popular for gift cards, you have another layer of consumer obscurity to penetrate because you’re dealing with two very different customer personas.
What are your two customer types?
Customer personas are an important organization concept in marketing. A customer persona is the ‘type’ of person who buys your products and services, or even a specific product or service, and that persona is based on the average demographic and behavior data you collect. If gift cards are part of your product offering, then you have two different types:
- direct customers who like your products and services, and
- gift-givers, who have one of your direct customers in their life.
These two buyer types, even though they’re too generic to be specific customer personas, have very different motivations. That means they need very different marketing tracks and incentives.
How do online gift cards help?
Gift cards provide a whole new set of data to help you make your marketing campaigns effective, and online gift cards are even more efficient. Each gift card has a unique code that lets you track everything from the number of gift cards purchased in given time frames to the amount on the average gift card each month. Even more importantly, the codes let you track the duration of time between the gift card purchase and the direct customer’s use of the gift card, as well as what purchases people are more likely to make with a gift card over cash.
From that last data set, you can start to find valuable trends. Direct customers who receive cards may be more likely to make larger, premium purchases because of the implicit difference between cards and cash. Gift cards purchased for a birthday might be spent faster than those purchased for Christmas. No matter what trends are unique to your company, you can plan your product offerings and sales accordingly to get a quick turnaround on card usage.
If you want a trusted gift card provider who can help you get your new campaign and gift card offerings off to a good start, contact us now.
