Why a Gift Card Platform Is Better Than Direct Ordering

When you realized just how much digital rewards can increase engagement with customers, prospects, research participants, and more, you likely started where most buyers do. It usually goes something like this: You visit Amazon.com or Starbucks.com and order a bunch of gift cards online, record all the codes in a spreadsheet alongside the names and emails of your recipients, and spend hours manually distributing those rewards.

But managing digital rewards doesn’t have to be such a time-consuming, tedious, and error-prone process. By using a gift card platform, you can streamline delivery and put your focus back where it belongs — on meeting and exceeding your program’s goals. And eliminating manual distribution is just one of the many advantages of a digital rewards tool.

READ MORE: 3 Tips for Effective Incentives Management

Save More Time

Implementing a gift card platform to manage digital rewards lets you save time on multiple fronts.

• Upload large lists of recipients. No need to individually enter emails or send codes. By uploading a spreadsheet of recipient names and email addresses, you create the whole list and distribute all the rewards with just a few clicks.
• Automate delivery with integration. Even better, find a gift card tool that integrates directly into your existing marketing and research tech stacks and workflows. You won’t need to create or upload recipient lists at all! Set triggers for reward delivery, and the necessary recipient information will be passed to the rewards program automatically.

Offer a Better Recipient Experience

When you purchase rewards directly from each retailer, you have a lot less flexibility than you can get with a gift card platform, along with other disadvantages that can hurt your ability to provide recipients with a great rewards experience.

• Choose from a wide selection of rewards, all in one place. Rather than ordering from each individual vendor, you can offer e-gift cards from multiple brands — and in multiple currencies — in one campaign. Letting your recipients pick the reward they want makes it a much more compelling offer.
• Customize your reward emails and redemption page. Adding your own branding and messaging to your delivery emails and redemption pages makes them more recognizable and helps recipients associate the fun experience of receiving a reward with your brand.
• Provide instant gratification with immediate delivery. The process of ordering gift cards and sending them out manually takes time, and the longer it takes, the less impactful the reward becomes. Plus, there’s no way you can constantly monitor survey responses or demo requests or whatever it is you’re incentivizing. By taking advantage of the integration and automation capabilities of a digital rewards platform, you can ensure that recipients get their gift card instantly by email or SMS. Even better, if a recipient says they didn’t get their reward, you can resend it with one click.

Get Better Visibility

In order to know how much you’ve invested in rewards and how successful the program has been, you need to have the full visibility that a gift card tool offers.

• See which recipients have claimed their rewards. Once you manually distribute gift card codes ordered directly from the retailer, that’s where your visibility into your rewards ends. A digital incentives tool lets you see how many rewards were delivered, who received them, and whether or not they were claimed.
• Monitor your budget in one place. Keeping track of each individual gift card order, especially if you’re purchasing from multiple different retailers, is a huge pain, and any mistakes can be a big problem for your budget. A gift card platform lets you see all your purchases in one place, not to mention you can allot separate budgets to each campaign or user group.

These are just a few of the many benefits that the BHN Rewards platform has over ordering incentives directly from retailers. Request a demo to see them all!

about the author

Hannah Prince

Hannah is a reformed journalist who has more than 15 years of experience and now focuses on content marketing for innovative tech companies.

Hannah is a reformed journalist who has more than 15 years of experience and now focuses on content marketing for innovative tech companies.