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What are the best gift card sites?
If you’re going to send gift cards at scale, you want to be sure to have a robust gift card site to help you administer and track your programs. Using a gift card platform can make the process faster and easier, and deliver a wealth of information at a glance.
In this post, we’re going to take a look at the many benefits of using gift cards for your rewards programs, find out where to get the best price on gift cards for your business, and explore the power of an automated gift card platform in helping you get it all done more efficiently.
The benefits of using gift cards
Easy delivery
Using gift cards for your rewards programs allows you to deliver a quality experience to every recipient without the need of paying shipping charges, packaging endless gifts by hand, or spending valuable employee time tracking and dealing with issues. You can send thousands of gift cards out the door simultaneously and never touch a physical gift card.
Impactful customization
Where physical promotional gifts are often one-size-fits-all (which, honestly, really means one-size-fits-least) gift cards can be tailored to the needs and desires of your recipients. You’ll have full control over the customization of the experience.
Global reach
Your customers, prospects, and employees are everywhere. With digital gift cards, you have the opportunity to meet every recipient right in their inbox without worrying if they’ll be able to use their card as intended. Large campaigns sometimes rely on generic cards (such as the American Express gift card, Visa debit cards, or popular brands cards such as the Target, Walmart, or Starbucks gift card) in administering international campaigns. However, with the expansive coverage of a globally-focused gift card platform, you can use creativity and data to make truly special moments for recipients.
Streamlined campaigns
Things don’t have to be difficult to be effective. By using e-gift card incentives through a reputable company, you can launch, maintain, and report on your campaign and maintain a close eye on the efficiency of your campaign.
Full data access
A centralized gift card platform makes it easy to research and analyze the important KPIs in your campaigns. By automating the process and improving your data visibility, you’ll empower your team to make highly informed decisions on future campaigns.
The risks of using gift card sites for the secondary market
While some consumers have luck finding a deal on secondary market sites like Gift Card Granny or Raise, this isn’t an effective way to buy gift cards online for your business marketing campaigns or rewards programs. Often, these cards are unwanted gift cards that other consumers are looking to trade for something more desirable. While these outlets sometimes offer a significant discount, it’s important to remember that, as with any resale platform, the outcomes might not be able to justify the savings.
Gift card scams are at an all-time high, with scammers becoming more sophisticated every day. It’s tempting to use one of the sites to get the best buy on a discounted gift card purchase. However, for the corporate customer, discount gift cards may become more of a problem than a cost-savings measure.
Buying gift cards directly through brand sites
The much safer option of procuring gift cards for your marketing campaigns is to deal directly with the brands you want to partner with. Often, card issuers for the large retail brands, such as the Apple gift card, Amazon gift card, Mastercard gift card, or Visa gift card will be able to offer more competitive pricing than a face-value purchase. You’ll avoid the activation fees of buying retail, and steer clear of the issues on gift card sites.
A few things to remember when going directly through a brand:
- Be sure to understand what minimum order requirements must be met to take advantage of volume discounts. Depending on the brand, you may be able to buy cards as needed.
- Check on the level of personalization available for your sends. High personalization is vital to capturing leads and clients. The gift is only part of the impact you make with an incentive. Higher ROI is also the result of the personal touch you add to your sends.
- Be sure you’re able to purchase e-gift card options over a physical card. While it’s nice to save cash on purchase fees, you don’t want to instead spend it shipping out expensive mailers to your customers.
Benefits of buying gift cards indirectly through providers
For corporate customers, there’s another type of gift card site that can save you time and cash, while making the sending process easier than ever. A gift card platform allows you to buy cards from brands indirectly, right through the platform. You’ll have access to hundreds of card options without the need to make individual accounts or brand partnerships. The best systems even offer gift card recapture, so you can get back the unused gift card balance and improve your campaign efficiency.
There are several advantages to using a gift card platform, versus creating a manual campaign:
Great value on cards
Gift card sites offer discounts of 5% to 15% on popular cards, but through a corporate gift card platform like Runa, you’ll save as much as 25% on the face value of the card. You’ll avoid activation fees, shipping charges, and gift card scams all at once. It’s an easy way to help your recipients get the perfect gift without paying a premium.
Easy and intuitive platform
Buying digital gift cards through the platform takes only a credit card and a few keystrokes to design a thoughtfully constructed campaign that gets engagement and connection from your recipients. This streamlined payment method means that anyone at your company can put together a gifting campaign quickly and easily. Using information you already have - such as email addresses, Slack IDs, social media info, or mobile phone numbers - you’ll be able to deliver a great experience right to their phone or computer.
Advanced ROI Tracking
The positive impact of a gift card program on your key metrics can’t be overstated. But those impacts can’t be seen if you don’t have reporting tools. The robust reporting and analysis capabilities of a gift card site like Runa are the real secret to improving your programs and your bottom line when sending cards at scale. Runa makes it easy to see the performance of your campaigns in real-time, by project, sender, demographic, remaining card balance, or any other dataset you’d like to evaluate. You’ll get data on which cards and categories are most desirable for your recipients, and what choices they make in choosing a card (or cards) from the curated catalog.
Getting started with Runa
Upgrading your current gifting programs with the power of a platform is an easy process. We offer integrations and support to get you up and running quickly and with little interruption to your current campaigns.
If you’d like to learn more about how a gifting platform can help you save cash while getting the work done faster, we invite you to take a demo of Runa to learn more.
