How Do Businesses Use Bulk Gift Cards for Sales Promotions?
Promotions featuring brand rewards and gift cards offer an easy, efficient, and flexible way to drive sales and build your brand without discounting your product or service.
In many instances, using bulk gift cards is the simplest and most cost-effective way to build a prize pool to excite your target and incentivize purchase, participation, or whatever behavior you want to achieve.
Here are a few strategies to help you think through the opportunities bulk gift cards offer for promotions.
What kinds of promotions use bulk gift cards?
Many different types of promotions leverage bulk gift cards because they offer flexibility and provide consumers with something they really want—especially when you build a prize pool with a lot of choices. Some of the most common promotions that effectively use bulk gift cards are sweepstakes, games, instant wins, rebates, incentives, and buy X get Y promotions.
Why would I use bulk rewards in a sweepstakes?
There are a lot of reasons to use bulk rewards in just about any sweepstakes promotion. You can use them to build excitement around a large, aspirational grand prize while providing many smaller prizes to increase the chances of your target audience actually winning something.
In many instances, the promotion can also be themed around your grand prize. This makes choosing the appropriate brand or brands you offer very important from a messaging standpoint. And that should drive the rest of your prize pool.
With bulk rewards, creating a prize pool with hundreds, thousands, or even millions of prizes available is easy. This makes more people feel good about participating and expands the demographic reach of your promotion, depending on the partners you choose. It depends on your budget, but offering prizes in the $1-$5 range is typically less expensive than you might imagine.
Sweepstakes are also popular with consumers because there is a very low barrier to entry. In many cases, they are automatically entered to win as soon as they purchase the key item of the promotion. No forms to fill out or receipts to send in. It’s simple for them—and you. Even redemption is easy since the prizes can be delivered digitally.
What is the benefit of using bulk rewards in games or instant win promotions?
The benefits of using bulk rewards in games or instant win promotions are fairly obvious when you think about the world we live in—people like games. And people love instant gratification. This is particularly true of young adult consumers but pretty much everyone expects whatever they want to show up now.
When you use bulk gift cards that can be redeemed digitally, not only will consumers know that they won, but they’ll be able to have their prize in their hands almost immediately. This is a huge benefit all around. For the consumers, they get their prize. And for you or your partners, the prize can be redeemed right away, driving immediate sales.
While it’s possible to have a game-based promotion or an instant win promotion, many times the two tactics work together. Think about the classic Monopoly® at McDonald’s promotion. There was an overall grand prize, a game board and pieces to collect, which drove repeat purchase. At the same time, many of the pieces also added an instant win which was typically a free food item available right in-store.
How exactly you structure your game or instant win promotion should be determined by what you and your partners are trying to accomplish.
Why would I use bulk gift cards as rebates or incentives in promotions?
The main reason to use bulk gift cards for rebates and other incentives is they essentially let you add value to your product or service without actually discounting it. And to be sure, once you start discounting your offering, it’s a slippery slope into the bargain bin and very difficult to rebuild that value in either price or brand equity.
One of the best types of bulk gift cards for rebates and incentives is prepaid cards. Essentially, they function as dollars off and give consumers the flexibility to spend it however they’d like. Of course, you can deliver messaging or structure your promotion to encourage consumers to spend that prepaid card with you—in-store or online.
These types of promotions are popular with many electronics manufacturers, wireless carriers, big box stores, and even national restaurant chains. Here is an interesting case study if you’d like to see how one mobile phone company executed its promotion.
Are bulk gift cards effective for buy/get promotions?
Bulk gift rewards can be very effective in a number of buy X get Y promotions, but you definitely need to understand your audience. The reason for this is buy/get tend to be more specific offerings than many of the other promotions we’ve discussed here.
As the name says, the name pretty much indicates why: if you buy this, you get that. In some ways, this could seem limiting. But it also gives you the opportunity to really hone in on a message and an offer you think will drive a very targeted audience to respond positively. It all comes down to the size of the prize, who it’s from, and the required purchase.
Of course, one popular way to keep the basic mechanics and strategies in place while providing more choice to the consumer is to offer prepaid cards again with a significant value.
How can NeoCurrency help you drive sales and build your brand?
One of the benefits of working with NeoCurrency to help develop an effective promotion leveraging digital bulk gift cards is we’ve done a lot of the heavy lifting for you already. Our catalog has rewards available from thousands of brands worldwide, from the big ones you’d expect to some very targeted ones unique to us.
1. Rewards planning
Many brands don’t get involved with promotions that offer bulk gift cards or virtual rewards simply because it seems difficult. People think it’s expensive, the process has too many layers to work through, and so on. It can be all those things, but that’s why we’re here.
We like to say that we’re marketers that just happen to provide rewards and prizes. With our long history of strategic rewards and prize pool planning, we can secure partnerships that normally take months to get approved much faster.
We simplify the entire process. We’ve negotiated everything—even creative challenges.
2. Prize pools
We have many different ways to help you develop a prize pool featuring bulk gift cards. We can help you create something strategically focused on one brand or many, with as many prize tiers that fit your strategy.
Our experts are here to help you create an appropriate prize pool, regardless of whether your promotion is a local, regional, or global effort.
3. Fast and simple bulk gift cards
NeoCurrency’s wholesale pricing is fixed with no hidden fees. You can manage everything from our intuitive reward dashboard or simply integrate it with our single gift card API.
Partner with NeoCurrency for your next promotion
NeoCurrency’s global catalog of digital rewards for over 2000 brands provides plenty of opportunities for you to run a successful promotion, regardless of the kind of program you want to run. We’ve been doing this for a long time and would love to put our experience to work for you.
Request a demo to get all the details about how we’ll help you develop and execute your next promotion featuring bulk gift cards by leveraging an extensive variety of brand rewards.