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.
Gift Card
The Differences
Comp Card
Purchased by customer
Issue method
Purchase by restaurant
Liability
Financial classification when issued
Expense
Revenue
Financial treatment upon redemption
Expense
Yes
Sales tax & income tax
No
Yes
Subject to tax escheatment
No
5 years
Minimum expiration period
None
[Image: Comp cards vs. gift cards slide]
10 Tips for Making the Change
Make sure that you own your data and can easily access it.
Create a team that handles gift card migration; this involves marketing, IT, finance, and operations.
Streamline the migration process to ensure all appropriate parties are weighing in.
Understand the timeline of the process so that your customers do as well.
Perform POS configuration and testing to ensure success.
Make an inventory of your current gift card stock to ensure you can meet demand.
Integrate online ordering so that the customer experience is as smooth as possible.
Consider third-party channels, while understanding that they add complexity.
Consider e-gift cards for added convenience.
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.
Customer behavior is always changing – and to keep up, all restaurants need to be able to provide a top-of-the-line guest experience. Whether your guests come into your locations or order online, they should have the ability to engage with loyalty programs, purchase and redeem gift cards, and place their orders with ease. While national chains have a lot of resources at their disposal, using the right technology can level the playing field and help independent restaurants and small restaurant groups compete.
As a provider of enterprise-class customer experience products to restaurants large and small, here are the 3 “must-haves” Paytronix recommends to keep your independent brand competitive:
Online Ordering: Since 2020, the number of restaurant customers looking to place food orders digitally has skyrocketed. While some customers are looking forward to getting back to restaurants and gathering and dining with friends and family in person, many have permanently embraced the convenience of ordering and dining at home.
With Paytronix Order & Delivery, restaurants can streamline their online ordering operations, to make it easier for your staff to focus on what matters most. As online ordering rose in popularity, many restaurants raced to partner with brands like Door Dash and Uber Eats to capture more orders, but were left with three or four tablets with orders coming in, and needing to manually enter those orders into the POS. HandoffSM brings all of the orders from third parties like Door Dash and Uber Eats and integrates right to your POS, reducing human error and freeing up staff to wait on in-house guests.
Once your customer receives their order – how does your management team know they’ve enjoyed their meal? On-site guests can talk to their server, and managers can make a situation right on the spot, but off-premise customers often don’t have any way to express themselves except to leave a bad review or decide not to return again. With FEEDbackSM your restaurant managers can save a guest relationship right away by getting instant responses from customers, and enabling the manager to respond to negative experiences with discounts and offers at the touch of a button.
Loyalty: Loyalty programs do more than foster goodwill between you and your guests. They provide a valuable communication channel and help to grow your customer’s lifetime value. Built with the busy operator in mind, Paytronix delivers personalized, targeted, email messages in real-time so you can drive traffic every day.
The Paytronix platform also adds a layer of artificial intelligence to your campaigns by predicting future behavior, enabling highly productive segmentation, and making on-the-spot recommendations to increase spend and order frequency.
Regular customers are what drive business – but what happens when one of your regulars hasn’t been in for a while. How can you reach out to them and tempt them with a special offer or promotion to bring them back to your locations? A win-back campaign does just that, by identifying your customers who have missed an expected visit and sending them an offer to come back and remember what they love about your restaurant before they’re gone for good.
Check out this story of a brand who used a Win-Back Campaign to reengage with wayward loyalty members…with a 10.9x return!
Gift Cards: Restaurant gift cards are a popular way for your customers to share their love of your brand, whether for the holidays, a special event, or as a thank you and modern gift card programs include the ability to purchase and send a virtual gift card online as well as on site.
And for those customers who receive a gift card, making it as easy as possible for them to redeem their card creates a positive experience that they’re sure to remember. Providing the option for both online and on-site redemption with an online ordering integration means that these customers can celebrate the way they choose.
By using loyalty, online order & delivery, and AI-driven insights with one platform, you have all the data you need to motivate your guests to buy more often and more frequently and a program with the flexibility to grow as you do.
Interested in learning more? Get a demo with the team to learn more about what Paytronix can do for your brand.
We know that a better customer experience does great things for a brand. Well-designed and executed loyalty programs, especially programs like this one, can have a substantial impact on visit frequency, incremental revenue, and overall customer lifetime value. Research conducted by Paytronix and PYMNTS found that 70% of quick-service and fast-casual patrons take advantage of loyalty programs offered by several restaurants they purchase from frequently, and 64% of customers use loyalty programs at multiple restaurants from which they frequently purchase.
But it’s also true that what works today cannot work forever, so it’s important to have a technology platform in place that offers flexibility, and a team that knows how to take full advantage of a platform.
QDOBA is a long-time Paytronix partner, with a very successful loyalty program. But we are always looking for ways to increase revenue and to make the entire experience better. Working with the Paytronix Data Insights team, QDOBA took a deep dive into the data, asking questions of both active and lapsed users to understand how they interact with the brand, what they love, and what they want.
Guests made a few things clear. They loved the food and they loved earning rewards that got them free meals, but they wanted it to be easier. In short, easy redemption and relevant, compelling rewards are key to strong member engagement.
The result is a simplified program that offers a fast path to rewards which increases visit frequency and boosts customer acquisition.
It’s this kind of work that creates a thoughtful program that keeps the customer front and center.
As 2021 comes to a close, the Paytronix team took a look at some of our favorite apps from restaurants and c-stores.
In its early days, order and delivery services were an indulgence, a treat for the occasional lazy night-in after a long workday. But during the pandemic, online delivery became a lifeline for people stuck at home, and a competitive edge for c-stores and restaurants. Now we’re entering the next phase with “ghost kitchens” and “dark stores” rising out of vacated storefronts that were once home to traditional mom and pop businesses. These stores operate virtually, fielding orders digitally, fulfilling them behind closed doors, and dispatching couriers within minutes.
Today, mobile apps have become front and center for all brands, which means that restaurants and c-stores are transforming their apps to seamlessly integrate all of their services into a single touch-and-go hub. These services include:
Loyalty programs
NFC and in-app payments
Multi-channel messaging
Geo-tracking
Customizations such as product favorites and re-order capabilities
Experience is everything. A successful app captures the essence of your brand and delivers your services to customers in seamless and exciting ways.
