Plastic Gift Cards

From a business point of view plastic gift cards are an amazing way of having clients commit and spend money in advance with you in a relatively cheap and easy way. Having clients pay you up front for a service they might or could have in the future is a dream for anyone.

It’s up to you as a business to capitalise on this side of your business and to make your gift card shine, you need to have this product up front and in your client’s line of sight.

There are a couple of ways of doing this, so that it will work with your business model.

Have the gift cards with a barcode or magnetic stripe on (depending on what POS system you have in place) these once scanned can have any amount of money uploaded to the number on your system to be redeemed as and when the card is used. Having only one variation of the gift card can really help to keep your plastic card printing costs down and at Plastic Card Experts we can also do multiple variations still within reasonable printing costs.

• The advantage to this way is that you can use the same plastic gift cards for any amount that the client asks for and so are not limited to having a card that has a fixed amount. Remember these are going to be a gift to someone, so you need these plastic cards to have a look that is worthy of giving as a gift. Put some Hot foil onto your eco-friendly plastic cards, or add some spot UVS give a premium look with a matt finish.
• A great way for you to position your plastic gift cards is to mount them onto a carrier (basically card) and have a slot put in the cards, so that they can be hung somewhere that your gift cards can be seen by your customers and easily picked up. Decide how you would like to be able to read the details, so maybe have the cards hanging past the bottom of the carrier so that they can be read without detaching them from your carrier/card. If you have a barcode or magnetic stripe on your plastic gift cards then you can control them easily whichever way that you do them.

Have your plastic gift cards with a fixed sum on each card and do some variations on the amounts on the cards, again you might still need to have a barcode or magnetic stripe added to the cards to be read by your system but you could also just charge without that needing to do that.

• Not having putting them onto a POS system really would only work with smaller retailers where you personally know where the cards are going.
• At least have the cards numbered so that you have an idea of how many you’re putting out there and keep some form of log (even on paper) of which ones you have sold. As you can imagine, if you have not kept control of these cards doing it without an activation barcode it could well end up costing you money.
• Why not think about how the gift card could also be linked into a loyalty card program, so that the plastic gift cards can be continually used.

At Plastic Card experts we can help you with whatever options that you need for your gift cards and will always find the most cost effective way for you to implement your plastic gift cards program.

Hang your plastic gift cards where they can be seen, you don’t need to worry about if they are taken (shoplifting), the cards will not have a value until they have been activated at your till point.

If you’re not having a barcode or magnetic stripe on and just having an amount of money that they are worth, you will need to keep them somewhere safe and the problem with that side is that you want them to be seen.

The client picks up one of the gift cards and brings them to the till point, at that point you’re going to scan it into your till point which would activate the card. The client then pays you the agreed sum which is then stored against the number that is on the cards within your computer system. You then as a retailer are holding banked cash against a future purchase.

Depending on how you have your carriers it could be useful to have a gift name and message which can be wrote onto the carriers for them when they are giving the plastic gift card to the receiver. A few days later a new customer walks in with their shiny new plastic gift card ready to spend some money.

This is the bit as a retailer that it can really become interesting, this point is where you’re going to want to try to keep this client coming back.

Having a few pounds left on the card after they have bought something, will keep them having your plastic gift card in their wallets and hopefully coming back to spend that few pounds again towards a larger item .

Why not go one further and offer a discount on a second purchase if they produce their plastic gift card in the future?

However, you want to work your printed gift card into your system make sure you have a plan.

As a UK printer of plastic gift cards, we can work with you to provide the best solutions making it as easy as possible to work within your environment.