Gift certificates are an excellent way to create a quick surge of new sales from your existing clients and customers. Photo / Thinkstock
Gift certificates can be used in many types of businesses and are an excellent way to create a quick surge of new sales from your existing clients and customers.
Garden Centre Example:
Imagine that you own a garden centre and that you have a mailing list of many of your best garden centre customers. (By 'mailing list' I mean you have your clients 'snail mail' postal address.)
Step One:
Get 100 or more gift certificates professionally designed and printed for your garden centre.
This strategy works best if your gift certificates look and feel valuable to the people you give them to.
Which is why having them professionally designed and then printed on high quality paper is important.
(Your local digital printing firm can easily do this for you within a few days.)
Put a dollar value on each gift certificate that allows a person to buy a few things from your garden centre without having to spend any more money.
So you might put a value of $20 on each gift certificate as you have a lot of products in your garden centre that cost less than $20.
Have an expiry date of 2-3 weeks on each gift certificate.
And also have these words 'Only one gift certificate can be used by each customer' on the gift certificate as well.
Step Two:
Mail 100 of these gift certificates to your top 100 garden centre customers.
In other words these are going to people who you know that already spend a large amount of money each year on gardening products from your garden centre.
Include a short letter with each gift certificate that says something like this:
"Hi Jane
Just a quick note to thank you being a customer of XYZ Garden Centre.
We really appreciate your business and thought we would give you a little bonus to say 'thank you'.
You'll notice we've enclosed a $20 gift certificate with this letter.
This is valid for 2 weeks and can be used like $20 cash on anything in our garden centre.
We would be delighted if you could pop in over the two weeks and use this gift certificate.
Thanks again for being one of our special customers."
Kind regards
John Smith
XYZ Garden Centre
Now what do you think might happen if you mail 100 of your best garden centre customers a free $20 gift certificate that they can use on anything in your business during the next 2 weeks?
First of all, some of these customers will definitely come into your garden centre in this time frame and use their $20 gift certificate.
And because you have given these gift certificates only to your best garden centre customers many of them will buy far more than $20 of garden products when they come in.
The end result is that you could easily generate several thousand dollars (or more) of profitable new sales in this 2 week period.
You would also have a number of delighted customers now telling their friends about the special gift certificate they got from your garden centre as well.
An important point here is that these gift certificates are not going to people who have never spent money on your type of product or service before.
Instead they going to your best customers who you know are already spending good amounts of money on the type of things you sell.
(Which means there is an excellent chance they will spend more than the value of your gift certificate when they do come in.)
And even if some customers only use the gift certificate and don't spend more money when they come in, your out of pocket cost is only the wholesale value of the products they have received.
So in the case of your garden centre if a customer comes in and used the gift
certificate just to get $20 of free products your actual cost is closer to $10.
Which is a small investment to say 'thank you' to one of your best customers.
Gift certificates have the potential to be useful in a wide range of businesses.
And may be worth trying in your business as well.
No one has ever become poor by giving.
Action Exercise:
Get 100 or more gift certificates professionally designed and printed on high quality paper. Then test using them in your own business with some of your best customers.
Chris and Lee-Anne Minturn talk to Tom Raynel about the Jewellers Collective.