One of the most effective ways of promoting your gift cards is through email marketing, a powerful tool for capturing the attention of your followers. Even though email is over 30 years old, it still offers an incredible return on marketing campaigns. Every single dollar spent on an email campaign has an average return of $42 — that’s huge. If you’re ready to start your email marketing campaign today, begin with the following steps. With a little planning, you can run a gift card promotion that could earn your business major increases in revenue.
1. Assess your mailing list.
Before you send out an email marketing campaign, your first step is to assess your email list. If you’ve been in business for some time, you may have collected many emails, but not all of them may be valid at this point. Cleaning up your email list is a marketing best practice that will help you to target and track your email campaigns more effectively. You want to eliminate any nonfunctional or old email addresses that can clog up your email client or make reporting less accurate.
While initially, this will make your email list smaller, it will also make it significantly stronger. For instance, if you have an email list of 5k, but 500 of those email addresses are nonfunctional, your engagement will look much smaller than it actually is. There are several approaches to good mailing list hygiene. Some people suggest sending out an opt-in email or eliminating any email addresses that haven’t interacted with your content in six months. Your email service provider (MailChimp, Constant Contact, Campaign Monitor, or another ESP) will have the tools to schedule and perform an email clean-up.
2. Plan and launch a gift card promotion.
Once your email list has been cleaned up, you can start crafting a gift card promotion to send out to your customers. Our gift card marketing guide walks you through several steps to help formulate the most effective approach to your specific email marketing campaign. Start with your goals and work from there. Ask yourself how many gift cards you want to sell as a result of this promotion. In order to reach that goal, how many emails will you need for this specific promotion? Once you have the numbers in mind, start crafting the content of those emails.
First, get the basics down: what is being offered, and how can the customer follow through on your call to action? Verbally and visually, the action you want the reader to take should be incredibly clear. Choose several subject lines and intro sections so that you can run A/B testing on which email performs best. When you’ve crafted the copy, don’t be afraid to have a little fun with the design. Compelling visuals can create increased engagement compared with emails that are just copy-based.
3. Use email marketing software to track your response rate.
The power of email marketing software can give you analytics you never dreamed of. A reputable email marketing system can report back on open rates, click-thru rates, and length of time spent reading an email. A good email client will also allow you to run several A/B tests so that you can try them out. However, don’t dilute your email marketing campaign by running so many tests that the data is inconclusive. Instead, choose two strong email message contenders and see how they perform. You can always tweak your messaging, send time, length, or call to action with data you collect from your first few campaigns.
4. Cross-pollinate with other marketing tools.
Set up your gift card promotion to run on several different platforms for the most impact. A heavy Instagram user may click through several of your stories, while a TikTok user might be drawn in by your TikTok Live or a short video you post. Running a promotion on several platforms gives you an opportunity to identify where your audience can be found and how they prefer to interact with your brand.
5. Don’t be afraid of oversaturating your channels.
You may be familiar with the old marketing adage that a customer needs to see your brand seven times before they interact with it. Having a potential customer run across your promotion on several different channels won’t overwhelm them. Instead, it will lend a sense of urgency to your gift card marketing strategy. Most customers are multi-platform users. Reaching out to them on several different channels will empower them to choose the way they engage with you.
Run Compelling Gift Card Campaigns with Card Market
Want to kick off a campaign, but you’re not sure how to begin? Allow us to direct you to The Last Gift Card Marketing Guide You’ll Ever Need. Our guide will walk you through the process of ideating, planning, and implementing a gift card marketing campaign. Download our guide today to get started, or contact us to talk about creating a gift card strategy that can help take your brand to the next level.