Reward and Voucher cards play a key role in your marketing strategy and have the potential to maximise you Christmas Trading! So many retailers are missing out on the potential turnover that can be created during the festive season by not utilising their reward and voucher card systems correctly.
Following a year of unprecedented change and adjustments for all retailers. The correct reward or voucher card strategy can have the potential to increase your turnover as well as increase your customer loyalty base. While the opportunity for vouchers and rewards have a wide range and potentially high impact, many retailers are not utilising it to the full. Many retailers are offering a disconnected experience whereby vouchers or rewards are only able to be purchased or redeemed in-store or online but never both.
Don’t complicate your customers’ experience by applying to many rules and regulations in the claiming process. Focus on creating a connected omnichannel experience for your customers, allowing them freedom and choice to claim vouchers and rewards.
First stop, let’s look at promotional vouchers to your current reward card clients.
Promotional vouchers are great to use for targeted marketing campaigns. Identified a particular segment of your customer base, provide them with an incentive to revisit your store. The goal is to get your customers to spend more than the amount you’re giving away for free. Your options are endless. It could be customers who have purchased a specific product or spent a particular amount in a certain amount of time. You can even use promotional vouchers for retargeting abandoned cart on your online store. Your redemption rate can measure the true success of promotional vouchers. Ask yourself if your promotional coupon has true or enough value to drive the required behaviour.
Your promotion should be valuable for the selected segment. If your customers aren’t redeeming your vouchers, you’re not driving the behaviour and the increase in spending that you were aiming for. You may run the risk of accumulating non-redeemed vouchers on your balance sheet.
Because of this, you must offer your customers the chance to redeem these vouchers via multiple channels for their convenience. Both online and in-store should be an option; otherwise, you are creating friction and reducing your redemption rates. If you complicate the experience, you increase your chance of disinterest from the customers’ side.
Retailers fail to do this all the time, mostly because their instore and online channels and systems are not set up to enable cross-channel voucher redemption. Though it may take some time and investment, with the right system, you can make it standard that promotional vouchers that can be issued and redeemed through any channel.
Next, looking at gift vouchers.
Gift vouchers are a different offering to promotional vouchers where you need to maximise convenience not only for the gift giver but also for the gift receiver.
The giver is more likely to purchase a gift voucher from a business that provides multi-channel purchase and redemption options. The giver wants the convenience of buying the voucher via the channel that suits them and statistics suggest that it is more likely to be online due to the convenience this offers. However, without multi-channel voucher options, this means that the receiver is only able to redeem that voucher online, even if they would prefer to do so in-store. Retailers are missing out on the opportunity to acquire and grow new customer relationship that may be purchasing with a voucher for the first time.
As with promotional vouchers, you should use a cross-channel voucher strategy and make purchasing and redeeming gift vouchers online and in-store easy and convenient. Your voucher and rewards strategy plays a critical role in driving revenue and increasing customer lifetime value as well as driving brand and customer loyalty. But if there is friction built into the process across your different channels, you’re unlikely to see the full benefits.
Next steps
Creating a connected omnichannel voucher experience will set you on the path to increased revenue, market share and brand loyalty