A gift card management solution helps you issue and manage different kinds of gift cards and reward programs for your customers. From virtual and physical gifts to recurring or one-time rewards, retailers can offer a range of gifts as part of a more comprehensive loyalty management program.
It is crucial to make redeeming reward points seamless and easy and ensure no malpractices are involved. Hence, a trustworthy gift card management system is essential to build trust, reward customers, and nurture valuable customer relationships in the long term.
In this article, we look at 10 of the most important features before deciding on a gift card management system for your small-medium retail business.
Importance of a Gift Card Program for Small Businesses
Small and medium-sized businesses often need help trying to retain their customers. While loyalty management programs can help to an extent, there is a need for insight-driven campaigns that personalize loyalty programs and rewards redemption. Small businesses also face the threat of competition, which can be fierce and unrelenting.
A Gift Card Program that is insight-driven and embedded into the larger tech ecosystem of a retail company will help small retail owners seamlessly launch gift campaigns and ensure that the customer lifecycle is prolonged in their favor.
However, not all gift card management solutions are the same. It is important to look for certain essential features that help implement loyalty management programs efficiently.
10 Key Features of a Gift Card Management System for Small Businesses
User-Friendly Interface
The user-friendliness of a loyalty or gift card management program works in two ways. First, your customers should be able to add or redeem points seamlessly, ideally without manual effort. Second, your staff and teammates should be able to operate and launch campaigns, set access levels, protect customer data, and have access to a graphical user interface that is easy for staff unfamiliar with technology to use regularly. Hence, ensure the tool’s API is well-documented and your development team can easily integrate it with other tools or features.
Digital and Physical Card Integration
As omnichannel shopping has become more mainstream, customers are bound to expect that redemption of loyalty or reward points will be seamless across channels, too. This means your gift card management solution must adopt a digital-first approach without compromising on the physicality of retail purchasing.
Hence, it is essential to integrate digital and physical cards so customers can pick up from where they left off. They should be able to switch between mobile devices, your e-commerce website, and POS (if they are at your store) to redeem points and avail of gifts they have earned.
POS (Point-of-Sale) Integration
To provide a seamless loyalty points redemption experience, it is essential to integrate your gift card management system with your Point-of-Sale (PoS) system. This ensures your staff can quickly process sales and help customers redeem their reward points and gifts without waiting. For this to happen in a streamlined manner, choosing gift card management software with an API that is well-documented and easily recognized by your development team is essential.
Integrating gift card management software with your POS has multiple advantages, such as viewing historical card activity, allowing customers to make portal payments or use multiple cards, linking gift cards to loyalty programs, etc. Think of this as a necessary step towards making your retail business omnichannel.
Dynamic customer segmentation
All customers are not the same; hence, your loyalty programs must be tailor-made for each customer segment. Segmentation of your customers helps you build and identify accurate customer personas based on which you can develop loyalty programs.
Some attributes you need to include psychographics, demographics, and general data. Psychographics include user behavior, previous interactions, and personality types. Demographics include name, sex, income, ethnicity, etc. General attributes include location, device usage, and purchase history.
Segmenting your customers based on these various attributes helps you to launch rewards programs using gift cards that have a high ROI.
Comprehensive Reporting and Analytics
Every gift card management system should be equipped with advanced tracking and reporting capabilities. These reports should be supported by artificial intelligence (AI) and predictive analytics. This helps you to make data-driven decisions and tweak your existing loyalty management campaigns.
Many small business owners often integrate their data from gift card management systems with business intelligence modules to generate richer insights that help make better sales and business-related decisions. In addition, if the gift card management system is integrated with a more extensive retail ERP, exchanging data between the two systems also helps enhance customer experience and satisfaction metrics.
Security, Encryption, And Fraud prevention
Both friendly fraud and malicious fraud are common when you implement loyalty programs. Customers may try to make claims not rooted in reality or falsely accuse reward points of being siphoned off. E-card fraud is widespread, and your gift card management system must be safe and secure.
Every gift card management system should enable encryption and a custom code between 8 and 12 characters of random strings and numbers. You must also limit how frequently rewards can be redeemed and detect anomalies during redemptive activities.
Another way to avoid fraud and keep customer data safe is to implement a card assignment mechanism in which only the cardholder can use it to redeem gifts, and no one else can.
Multi-Store Support
Small businesses are not always small in a conservative sense and may have multiple stores located across a city or region. To truly implement an omnichannel shopping experience, your gift card management solution should come with multi-store support.
This ensures that customers can seamlessly redeem points across stores and not engage in fraudulent behavior. In addition, your staff will not end up irritating your customers trying to retrieve data from different locations. Multi-store support lets you quickly implement loyalty management campaigns and enhance customer satisfaction.
Omnichannel support
The omnichannel shopping experience is more than seamlessly processing orders across multiple channels. It is also about customers being able to redeem and access gifts at the right time without difficulties. Indeed, they should not have to call up your customer care team to address problems related to gift cards.
To help fix this problem, you can implement an omnichannel gift card distribution system, which includes email, specific native integrations such as MailChimp or ActiveCampiagn, or even SMS and push notifications.
QR codes and bar cards are excellent ways to make gift cards available anytime and anywhere. These methods align with a mobile-first strategy that eventually helps you become future-proof.
Gift Card personalization
Personalizing gift cards is essential to a loyalty campaign’s success. By tying crucial customer data with their previous purchasing behavior, you can offer cross-channel initiatives, implement targeted campaigns, and run multiple loyalty programs simultaneously.
You can also offer personalized coupons, recognize when a customer will most likely be receptive to push notifications and ensure you are as non-intrusive as possible. With rich data from multiple sources being collected on a centralized server, using insights from gift card management solutions will help you implement personalized campaigns that work.
Software Scalability
A crucial aspect of a successful gift card management system is its ability to scale. Smaller businesses tend to witness growth quickly, especially when they adopt digital transformation. Implementing successful loyalty programs can turbocharge this growth and make it difficult for these businesses that need help managing their success.
Hence, your gift card management solution should be scalable and future-oriented. One option is to use an API-based architecture, while the other is to pick a system that focuses on high performance. You will need to scale up and down depending on your growth, which is why scalability is so important when it comes to gift card management.
Why every small business should invest in a gift card management system
Today, small businesses are at a crossroads between technology adoption, customer retention, and maintaining relevance in the face of larger competitors. Digital transformation is crucial for smaller retail businesses that compete against larger market and sales budgets, more advanced ad campaigns, and better logistical infrastructure. A quick and easy way to compete with the biggies and even scale is by implementing successful loyalty management programs that retain and nurture existing and new customers.
A modern gift card management system helps small and medium-sized retail businesses to allow customers to redeem reward points and gifts on a user-friendly interface and ensure security and fraud prevention at the same time. In addition, they can offer multi-store and omnichannel support, which leads to better customer experience, enhanced ROI, and satisfaction metrics.
