Gift certificate help.

[D.C.Detail]

Hey everyone, quick question for you all, I'm interested in offering gift certificates for the winter months, but unsure of how to go about doing it, I have a few ideas I'm floating around, should I:

Offer a hard copy certificate that I would deliver to customer purchasing,
Offer an email based certificate which would be numbered to prevent duplicates from being produced, but then customer could have them right away and just have to print them off?

I'm going to work with my we guy to see if we can set it up on my webpage to be able to purchase these.

I'm just trying to get ideas to get some cash flow for the winter months. Any ideas would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you all

[Max Luster Auto]

A physical gift card, printed on nice card stock, would be much more effective I think. If the recipient would be a new customer, that would likely be their first impression of your business. Rather than an email or a cheap paper coupon, you can really set a good first impression with a quality, glossy coupon in a card or envelope. Even on the website, you could show a photo of the actual gift certificate, so the "giver" will know exactly what the recipient would be receiving.

[thebamboo23]

Hey everyone, quick question for you all, I'm interested in offering gift certificates for the winter months, but unsure of how to go about doing it, I have a few ideas I'm floating around, should I:

Offer a hard copy certificate that I would deliver to customer purchasing,
Offer an email based certificate which would be numbered to prevent duplicates from being produced, but then customer could have them right away and just have to print them off?

I'm going to work with my we guy to see if we can set it up on my webpage to be able to purchase these.

I'm just trying to get ideas to get some cash flow for the winter months. Any ideas would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you all

Good thinking to get business in the slow months.

But, the sales page on your site won't work.

How many people visit your site?
How would you direct people to your site?

Sharing a Facebook page directing them to your sales page won't work either.

At least not enough for people to take action.

A physical gift card, printed on nice card stock, would be much more effective I think. If the recipient would be a new customer, that would likely be their first impression of your business. Rather than an email or a cheap paper coupon, you can really set a good first impression with a quality, glossy coupon in a card or envelope. Even on the website, you could show a photo of the actual gift certificate, so the "giver" will know exactly what the recipient would be receiving.

I like the ideas but this is going way overboard.

This would A) cost more money and B) it hasn't even been validated that the gift certificates would work

So instead of spending money on printing, design, web guy, etc.. You need to ask yourself:

"What can I do to achieve my desired results without spending a lot of time / money?"

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

This is what *I* would do:

Send out an email to your entire customer email list.

This of course will only work IF you have a customer email list.

Which every business in this world SHOULD have a customer email list.

Now don't go adding every single contact into one email and send one huge email blast.

Mail Chimp is free up to 2000 subscribers.

Although you can't use the autoresponder feature in the free version, you CAN send an email blast all at once.

But if you have less than ~100 email contacts in your list, I would manually send each person an email.

I also wouldn't promote a gift certificate. I'd go with a referral program.

Aka "double loop" or something like that... can't remember the name

Referral: If you refer me one person, you get $10 off your next purchase AND the person you refer gets $10 off their first purchase.

You should play with the numbers and see which numbers incentivizes your customers to refer.

Remember, don't worry about giving away "to" much money in the referrals.

If you know your average customer spends $500 in the span of 6 months, then "giving" away $40 to get one new customer isn't a bad deal

The email can be something like this:

Hey _name_,

I hope you're still enjoying _something fun you guys have talked about in the past_.

Do you know if anyone else would enjoy my services as much as you have?

If you refer me a friend, you'll get $10 off your next detail AND your friend get $10 off their first detail.