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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.

As noted in the recently-released Gift Card Report: 2023 from Paytronix, restaurant gift card sales have been going increasingly digital since 2020. But the effect of this shift shows up brightly when we looked closely at Valentine’s Day card sales.

Paytronix data shows that digital gift card sales on Valentine’s Day hit their highest number on record, increasing nearly 7% over last year and more than doubling since 2019. Also of interest, the highest sales of digital gift cards shifted from the day before Valentine’s Day to Valentine’s Day itself, indicating that guests are taking advantage of the flexibility of digital gift cards and delaying their purchases until the last minute.

This has the potential to change how brands market cards to their guests.

Moreover, 2023 saw the highest revenue of any year from 2019-2023 for the period from February 1 through 14, indicating that restaurant gift card spending may finally surpass pre-pandemic revenue – a welcome relief for a restaurant industry battered by the pandemic, inflation, and staffing shortages.

And of course, to all the restaurants out there: Happy Valentine’s Day from your friends at Paytronix. We have gift cards for all of you.

Today, Paytronix looks a whole lot different. We have a new logo, new colors, and a whole new brand. But this isn’t about an instant transformation, it’s about making our brand match the company we’ve become.

Here at Paytronix, we’ve been innovating in the digital customer engagement space for more than two decades. We created the category.

Two Decades of Technology Growth

When we set out on this journey, technology was transforming the landscape, not just for restaurants and convenience stores, but for nearly every aspect of our lives. This was before the iPhone, when mobile devices flipped open. Most discussions of artificial intelligence were relegated to science fiction, and the innovative brands had just started to use digital technology to track core business functions.

With just 10 employees and a handful of clients, we defined the category of digital restaurant loyalty. Today we have 350 employees worldwide, passionately innovating for our more than 1,800 clients. When Newsweek named the top restaurant loyalty programs, we found 12 of our clients on the list. When Nation’s Restaurant News recently called out the groundbreaking loyalty programs of this year, our clients Wow Bao and Jimmy John’s were honored. We work with convenience stores that are on the edge of innovation, including Maverick, GPM, Kum & Go, Yesway, MAPCO, United Dairy Farms, and so many others.

A New Era of Digital Guest Engagement

We’ve changed with the times, both in our technology and our offerings. Often, we were the first in the industry with new technologies. We innovated on gift cards, e-gift, and even comp cards. We were on the forefront of using artificial intelligence to understand guest behavior and help our clients build effective programs on that knowledge. We began offering online ordering when it was still a small part of the market and have grown to become one of the two enterprise platforms in the space.

And while we innovated and changed our offerings, our brand remained stagnant. The result was a large gap between who we are and what we looked like.

When we went out and spoke with our customers, partners, industry leaders, and even our prospects, you told us a few things.

First, that we are the gold standard when it comes to digital loyalty. For this, we thank you. Yet, we now offer so much more than loyalty.

Second, that this new world of digital guest engagement is difficult, and they trust our team to help them through it. Through the pandemic, restaurants, convenience stores, and other retailers put together the digital tools they needed to survive, including loyalty, online ordering, messaging, mobile apps, CRM systems, and a host of other keys to digital engagement.

The challenge today is that these pieces need to align to be truly effective, and that’s what the Paytronix team is built to do.

And third, that our look and feel didn’t match the dynamic company they know. We believe our brand now matches our offering, and we hope you do, too.

So many of you have been clients for five, 10, 15, or even 20 years. We look forward to writing the next chapter of our joint success by keeping your guests happy and returning. After all, that’s what keeps our team motivated every day.