Email marketing is loved equally by its users (91% of Americans are willing to receive them) and marketers. Over 4.147 billion individuals are using the platform, which delivers the highest ROI of $44 against every buck invested. This has resulted in marketers sending over 319.6 billion messages every day, translating to 121 emails for every single user. Thus, keeping your subscribers engaged is a tough job.
A time-tested way to boost your campaign performance and keep engagement levels high is by sending gift cards to your subscribers. Everyone likes getting surprises from their favourite ones, don’t they? Today, I will be sharing my two cents on using gift cards in the emails below:
Image Credits: Salecycle.com
Highlights of Contents
Your Customers Are Waiting To Receive Gift Cards In-Mail
An HTML email developer or email marketer will tell you that promotional emails receive the highest engagement rates, and sending gift cards is only going to add to it. A survey finds that over 60% of the people already have gift cards on their wish list, and sending one can drastically improve their engagement with your brand.
Thus, a lot of your customers would be happy to receive them in their mailboxes. You can also sell gift cards to your subscribers as finding an ideal gift during festivities and personal occasions like birthdays is a challenging task.
This is due to the fact that it becomes difficult to choose an actual gift, and buying a gift card instead seems a better solution for most people. They need not worry about giving the right item since the gift card would allow the recipient to buy anything of their choice available in the store. It is also a secure way of doing so compared to sending physical cash and a more dignified method than simply transferring the money into someone’s account.
Sending Gift Cards Improves Brand Loyalty And Engagement Rates
Promotional emails are among the top picks to drive sales and engagement, but including gift cards in your email campaigns is a smart tactic to build brand loyalty during the process.
You can send cascading offers where customers can avail offer value after spending a certain amount. It triggers immediate purchase and coming up with such offers during festivities and holiday season also increases your brand loyalty as customers start associating you with their good times.
You can also improve your engagement rates during sales seasons as your subscribers will be expecting your message out of habit. Have a glance at an example of using this tactic below:
Gift Cards Can Increase Brand Awareness
Brand awareness is one of the biggest benefits of gift cards apart from sales. When your customers buy it from you and send it to their family and friends, the chances are that the recipient will make their first purchase from you. It allows them to explore your brand and kick off their buyer journey.
This also allows them to glance at your entire product range, your branding elements like logo, colour palettes, web copies, and images. This makes digital gift cards far more superior than physical ones as you can market your brand to almost any corner of the globe without any time restrictions. Plus, you can always convert this new business into a regular business with the help of email marketing campaigns and other outreach methods. Dunkin Donuts used this idea to build positive brand awareness on Mother’s Day.
Gift Cards Are Great At Reactivation
You can use gift cards to win back agitated customers and receive dormant leads. When a customer is disappointed with your products due to receiving them in a damaged situation or mismanaged deliveries, you can send them gift cards to cool down the situation.
This makes them feel good and appreciated, thus saving you from losing a regular customer. On the other hand, the average churn rate for an email list sits at 25-30%, and you can try reactivating these dormant leads before they make their minds to leave your subscriber list. You can always expect these customers to put their hands in the pockets to shell out a few extra dollars above the voucher amount like any other customer since they would go through all the items listed. Here’s how sleep country used them:
You Can Earn Referral Clients Using Gift Cards
You can make the opt-in necessary for activating the gift cards, and this way, you will be able to add more subscribers to your mailing list. Like restaurants, it is observed that people like to shop from places where their friends and family are already making purchases. Thus, you can build a pipeline of referral clients by offering gift cards. Once you onboard these new leads, you can gradually increase the mailing frequency and include them into your regular customer base.
Summing Up
A lot goes into running successful email marketing campaigns, and you always need to serve different types of messages to keep performance metrics healthy. What works especially well for gift cards is the feeling of receiving a surprise and the flexibility of buying anything that comes with it. Therefore, gift cards can increase your email campaign and overall marketing performance by constantly engaging your existing and new leads. I hope you find this article insightful.
