What should your gift card goals be for the new year?

Goal setting is an important part of any business – and your gift card program needs clear KPIs.

From our work with retail brands we have insights into what top retailers track. What will you focus on for #2022? These are the stats you need to have to hand…

• Interest and Sales – Typically this will be tracked from gift card page impressions, as well as data from 3rd party sites or partnerships. How much attention are your cards getting vs other products or pages? What difference is there between different designs and artwork styles? Averages vary, but typically within the month of December, a merchant sells around 30,774 digital gift cards.

(Source: Rise.ai, survey of 1,528 U.S. online retailers, 2020)

• Conversions – What channels are converting gift card sales? Which are falling behind? Is digital your strongest channel? Bear in mind, in 2020 the number of digital gift cards sold in November 2020 increased 25.0% year over year and increased 106.1% year over year in December 2020, indicating yours may also be seeing growth.

• Average Value – What value are people spending on your gift cards? How is this different depending on where the purchase was made? Is POS producing higher or lower average spend than digital channels? 
• Overspend Average – What is the % of overspend per card on average? What are the seasonal differences and levers of change here that you can see? A typical average value of gift card spend is £27.64, but typically an extra £18.55 is spent on top.

What are the different demographics spending – and should you target these segments more closely?

Naturally, your insights may be limited by the data you take from a digital card or integration with your EPOS / loyalty card – but there can be some useful insights. For example, recent trends in the USA show that shoppers vary in spend significantly. Those older than 65 years old will spend the most at an average of $175.96, followed by 35-44 year old who will be spending an average of $171.15 on gift cards.

Furthermore, men will spend approximately $20 more than women on gift cards this holiday season.

(Source: Gift Card Spending Survey conducted by Prosper Insights & Analytics for the National Retail Federation)

There are many ways to boost the results you are currently getting, from tricks around presentation, placement, design, functionality right through to delivery.

Get ahead of other retailers with a firm gift card strategy. It all starts with a call or an email!