The days of gift cards being considered impersonal or thoughtless are long gone. Over the last few years, we’ve all learned how to be more flexible, especially when shopping for gifts.
So if you’re having trouble moving the needle on your loyalty reward program, you may be excited to learn that gift cards are growing in popularity.
While some recipients still prefer physical gift cards, the gap is closing, with nearly two-thirds wanting digital gift cards, according to research from Blackhawk Network. The uptick in digital gift cards is most likely due to the increase in first-time adoption of mobile wallets since 2020. There are more ways than ever to use and spend digital gift cards.
These days, more transactions are being done on our ever-present smartphones. That includes your loyalty reward program. The convenience factor of digital delivery — via email or text — cannot be underestimated.
Consumers increasingly want to engage with businesses via SMS, whether that means answering a survey or receiving special offers and promotions. According to Textedly, three-quarters of users would like to get offers, including promotions and coupons, via SMS.
When your loyalty reward program supports SMS delivery, you’ll not only provide an experience your recipients want, you’ll be able to engage more easily.
READ MORE: 8 Stats to Prove You Need a Rewards Platform With SMS Delivery
Consumers are increasingly using mobile wallets to store their prepaid and gift cards in one place. In fact, a third of consumers said that whenever they receive a gift card, they load it into a mobile wallet, according to Fiserv’s 19th annual Prepaid Consumer Insights Survey.
Your loyalty reward program needs to keep pace with this shift to mobile payments and transactions. Not only will going digital give your recipients what they increasingly prefer, it also benefits you, allowing you to:
When you modernize your loyalty reward program for digital delivery, you’ll also be better able to understand your customer’s behavior.
You’ll see who received each reward, how each rewards campaign performed, and how many rewards were sent and claimed. You can use this information to personalize your campaigns based on what’s working.
Best of all, you can integrate your loyalty reward program with your other marketing automation to streamline processes, enabling you to:
If you’re already using a program like Marketo, Talkable, or Zapier to streamline and automate your marketing efforts, you’ll want to implement a digital rewards management solution that can work with those existing workflows.
Combining a digital loyalty reward platform like BHN Rewards with the HubSpot CRM and automation tools, for example, means you can implement strategic rewards and personalized gifts at scale, targeting customers, prospects, or anyone in your contact database at just the right time with just the right thing.
When you bring your loyalty reward program into the digital age, you’ll make your marketing efforts easier to manage and have the data to back up your ambitions.
Ready to learn more about the most flexible rewards platform available? Request a demo to see all the amazing features that BHN Rewards has to offer (now including SMS delivery)!
BHN Rewards puts the power of digital rewards to work for marketers, researchers, and HR managers. Don't forget to check out all the great content in our Resources section!
BHN Rewards puts the power of digital rewards to work for marketers, researchers, and HR managers. Don't forget to check out all the great content in our Resources section!
