Chuck Tanowitz

Gift cards are a key part of the guest engagement ecosystem often acting as a way that guests can share their favorite brands with others. Also, in today’s mobile-oriented world, e-gift with recharge acts as a way for guests to store value that they can use for regular orders. So choosing the right provider is key.

Gift Card Tips

Gift cards help you extend your brand presence beyond your locations by expanding your channels and meeting your guests where they are. You can also offer online or virtual gift cards. Beyond that, you can expand to third-party and discounted third-party retailers, but remember that this step adds complexity. It’s important to know the limits of your spreadsheets by tracking sales fees, discounts, breakage across programs, and money movement between locations.

Investing in a Gift Card Solution

When selecting a gift card software provider, you need to make sure that the platform delivers the automation you need, so that you can avoid having to manually track gift card costs and discounts. Discount tracking is a huge part of this automation; it helps you recognize the expense card-by-card and transaction-by-transaction.

You also need a provider that can help you track money movement (both centralized and decentralized) across different stores, franchises, and corporations.

Tips for Managing a Successful Program

• One of the most time-consuming processes in this realm is reconciling gift card sales and redemptions across different systems. Robust and trustworthy reporting on liability and redemption can help you be prepared for audits.
• Avoid guest friction by making it easy to purchase, redeem, and check the balances of gift cards, and ensuring funds are redeemable both at the point of sale and for online ordering.
• Keep your franchisees happy by ensuring that accurate, reliable, timely, and automated settlement funds are available.
• Keep your guests happy by considering comp cards instead of gift cards; gift cards can add extra layers of complexity for your accounting.

[Image: Comp cards vs. gift cards slide]

10 Tips for Making the Change

1. Make sure that you own your data and can easily access it.
2. Create a team that handles gift card migration; this involves marketing, IT, finance, and operations.
3. Streamline the migration process to ensure all appropriate parties are weighing in.
4. Understand the timeline of the process so that your customers do as well.
5. Perform POS configuration and testing to ensure success.
6. Make an inventory of your current gift card stock to ensure you can meet demand.
7. Integrate online ordering so that the customer experience is as smooth as possible.
8. Consider third-party channels, while understanding that they add complexity.
9. Consider e-gift cards for added convenience.
10. Be sure your new provider matches or improves your current reporting.

How Gift Card Programs Can Serve Your Strategy

Gift cards can be a key part of a larger guest engagement strategy. When combined with loyalty programs, ordering, and comp, they can create real and lasting value, as long as they are smoothly aligned with each other.

Listen to the Paytronix podcast with restaurant and retail analyst Ryan DiLello here.

PDQ Restaurants Goes Hyper-Local with Paytronix Mobile Experience Builder

PDQ Restaurants, which stands for People Dedicated to Quality, has had a strategy of truly local engagement since it first opened in 2011. Each of its 62 locations across five states gets involved in local community efforts to build loyalty and engagement. That’s why when Paytronix released Mobile Experience Builder, the PDQ team was eager to get on board and put it into action.  

“Each of our locations gets deeply involved with projects like local philanthropy, supporting local schools, or sponsoring local youth sports. Mobile Experience Builder gives us the tools we need to create community-oriented experiences for each location that matters to those guests,” said Ken Bott, who leads Digital and Loyalty strategy for PDQ.

One of those experiences extends across four units in two states. Customers who frequent locations near where the New York Mets play, both on Long Island and near the Mets spring training facility in Florida, receive specific messages to support The Alonso Foundation. Founded by New York Mets All-Star First Baseman Pete Alonso and his wife Haley, the Alonso Foundation helps those in need by being a voice and standing up for those who can’t speak for themselves. The Alonso Foundation supports youth initiatives, animal welfare, and veteran’s aid as the core of its mission. The promotion started when the Mets kicked off their home season. Running through the first month of the season, guests are invited to round up their checks or make a donation, with 100 percent of all money raised given directly to the Foundation.

Mobile Experience Builder enables marketers to take advantage of geofencing tools to deliver store-specific promotions and messages. These are all designed to eliminate the need for costly third-party designers and developers while modernizing the management of branded mobile apps with real-time updates that save time, money, and energy on app maintenance. It also ensures that guests can access up-to-date information, including announcements and LTOs.

That’s what is happening at the Winston-Salem, North Carolina location, where guests get something entirely unique. It’s there that PDQ has created a co-branded partnership with Texas Pete. The two brands are testing a new recipe of Texas Pete Hot Sauce and PDQ’s signature Honey BBQ sauce. In a campaign called “Pete & Petey, a Match Made in Heaven,” PDQ offers a sandwich, nuggets, and tenders, all tossed in a unique combination of Texas Pete and PDQ sauces. The PDQ App home screen features the products so those guests are sure to know about the offer.

In the future, PDQ plans on executing these kinds of programs at all of their stores, giving local teams and community organizations the opportunity to communicate directly with their guests through the mobile app. It’s all part of the brand’s strategy to build loyalty and engagement.

The great thing about selling gift cards is that it’s about more than making a gift of a nice meal – it’s about giving someone a great experience. Full-service restaurants know this, and they’ve realized that gift cards are an ideal way to turn first-timers into regulars… and regulars into brand ambassadors. Because gift cards, after all, always bring customers back to the brands they love.

So how do restaurants go about winning gift card sales? Do they take a one-size-fits-all approach? Or is their strategy to get a little more targeted and a little more nuanced? Let’s take a look.

A Remarkable Recovery

The pandemic was catastrophic for the restaurant industry… but the numbers show it’s making a strong recovery. According to the Restaurant Gift Card Report: 2023 from Paytronix, gift card sales at full-service restaurants have staged a remarkable comeback from the worst depths of the pandemic. Year over year since 2021, both revenue from gift card sales and total cards sold at full-service restaurants increased, by 12% and 10%, respectively. This is especially interesting when compared with the numbers for quick-service restaurants, whose gift card sales actually declined (despite weathering the pandemic better overall).

Moreover, revenue from gift card sales at full-service restaurants has increased since 2019, although the number of cards sold at full-service restaurants has yet to hit pre-pandemic levels, with one exception: fine dining.

The Impact of Inflation

The majority of card sales at full-service restaurants are for $20, $25, $50, and $100 cards. As compared to 2019, the percentage of $50 and $100 cards sold has risen, while the percentage of $20 and $25 cards sold has fallen, indicating that inflation has pushed up the cost of a dining experience at these restaurants. On the whole, guests have responded in positive correlation with higher prices.

How They’re Winning Sales

Full-service restaurants have broken out every trick in the book to drive gift card sales. One evergreen, can’t-miss tactic that has consistently driven bigger results is the flash sale. Flash sales have worked particularly well for Duffy’s Sports Grill, a Paytronix client headquartered in Palm Beach County, Florida; their holiday gift card sales (during which physical gift cards are offered along with bonus dollars) have delivered incredible results. The results were especially dramatic in 2021: on flash sale days, sales increased by up to 10.9 times the daily average.

Don’t Forget Digital

Digital sales are also a critical tool in the toolbox. Digital gift card sales have seen a 12% increase in revenue year over year, and are often more valuable than physical cards, due to added perks and incentives from digital sales. During the holiday season, Cyber Monday continues to see the highest sales of any day during the holiday period from Black Friday to Christmas Eve. Even though digital cards represent just 12% of the gift cards sold between Black Friday and Christmas Eve, their sales have increased over 70% since 2019.

Would you like to know more? Just download the Restaurant Gift Card Report: 2023 from Paytronix FREE today.

The convenience store chain’s National Pizza Day campaign grows orders by 10x

Making a splash with pizza is a tall order, even in the best of circumstances. But standing out on National Pizza Day? That’s a whole different level.

Family Express ran a hyper-personalized digital marketing campaign powered by Paytronix Loyalty to introduce guests to their pizza – and keep them coming back. The campaign helped the convenience store brand reach record numbers for daily pizza orders, achieved sustained lift, and earned deeper guest loyalty.

With 81-units, Family Express is well-known for providing great service to its guests, but also for its food offerings. The brand recently rolled out bean-to-cup coffee and high-end tea on top of its custom food offerings like bakery items made in-house.

But only 30 units offer Cravin’s to Order, which includes hot foods like pizza, boneless wings and breakfast items. And the pizza is far from off-the-shelf.

When National Pizza Day rolled around, they wanted to offer a deal that would not only introduce guests to their pizza, but would keep them coming back. The offer was simple: 2 XL pizzas for $12. But it’s the rest of the work that made this deal break through.

Using Paytronix Loyalty, the Family Express marketing team segmented its audiences to find those who they could hit with the right message at the right time. By looking just at those who visited one of the locations with Cravin’s to Order, or a nearby store, within the last 60 days, they avoided frustrating those who couldn’t partake in the deal.

To top it all off, they chose not to run any in-store signage. In other words, this was a test of how well the digital marketing program could drive on its own.

On National Pizza Day, they broadcast the offer as an app notification and orders began trickling in. But it was a 2pm email that triggered a flood of orders.

“It was the best kind of mayhem, and our people did an amazing job in the kitchens keeping up with the demand” said Thierry Lyles, Head of Digital Marketing for Family Express. 

A few hundred open orders flowed through within the first 90 minutes. When it was done, Family Express had nearly 10 times the number of typical daily orders – an all-time high. The benefit spilled over beyond pizza, with add-on purchases raising the average ticket price to $18.  Mobile ordering accounted for most of the traffic, with 70% of online orders coming in through that channel.

The story of Family Express’s National Pizza Day extends past its holiday debut. Today, the brand’s benefiting from a 10% sustained lift from the previous month’s digital sales. Pizza fans who may have visited at the word of a good deal, are sticking around for the value of the loyalty program.