Businesses Now Eclipse Consumers In Digital Gift Card Giving

On the consumer side of gift card giving, that tangible piece of plastic still has a foothold that is likely to stick around for quite some time. That’s because when one is giving a gift — for a birthday holiday, special event, etc. — it is nice to have something physical to hand over to the recipient.

On the business side, where Tango Card exists, Founder and CEO David Leeds told Karen Webster that things work a little differently. In an inversion of their consumer counterparts, when it comes to businesses gifting digital cards, things are expanding more rapidly.

“I think if anything, we just continue to see the digital side of things radically accelerate on the enterprise side,” Leeds said. “The pandemic in particular has lasted so long now that almost every program that we talk about with every company is really leading with digital.”

That’s because businesses are discovering that gift cards create an effective avenue for reaching consumers and employees that is more customizable to their specific wants and needs, he said.

A Brand-Preserving Alternative To Discounting

Brands, particularly consumer brands, are always looking for means and methods to generate demand and acquire customers. Discounting is a well-known mechanism, but a complicated one in a digital environment where a savvy consumer can almost always find the same discount offered elsewhere. What brands want, he said, is to find a way to offer their product or service to consumers without having to cheapen it with a discount.

“Many of them are really finding that a gift card, and a digital gift card in specific, is a really good incentive to purchase, but in a way that adds value to the product,” Leeds said.

The challenge there, he noted, is getting customers into place with something of an expectation that they will continue to be motivated to shop. But there are almost no companies that are “operating at a loss by offering gift cards” because they’re learning how to leverage those incentives over the course of a customer relationship. They might dial back the size or type of the reward or the incentive over time if the data indicates it’s a safe move. But as long as leveraging gift incentives is driving the business results companies want, the cost becomes largely secondary and they keep them going long term.

Creating New Engagement Channels

Beyond using them as a consumer outreach tool, Leeds told Webster, the last year and a half has really seen corporations get creative with gift cards as a means to connect with and aid their suddenly remote employee base. At first, that started with firms just wanting to get their work-from-home employees a meal and turning to restaurant delivery gift cards.

“Companies would say, ‘Hey, let’s put Grubhub, Uber Eats, and others into a gift card so that the recipient could then choose what’s the best food delivery service for them.’”

That idea expanded from there into offering employees things like grocery gift cards, eCommerce transactions and even local experiences, he said. Companies powered by digital gift cards have been moved to reconsider their catalog of offers and update them to meet the needs of the day.

And meet the needs of organizations that are offering incentives to customers or rewards to employees via gift cards. Brands are less often asking if they can start with physical and then move to digital, or they roll out with both. The status of people returning to offices remains a bit up in the air, Leeds said, meaning businesses are asking a lot more questions about how they use digital products — and there is a greater push toward decentralization of things like purchasing and how companies can better monitor and track such products.

See also: Why Businesses Use Tango Card For Employee Reward Programs

Most critically, he said, firms want to offer choice, so that reward an enterprise is looking to offer up lands with the recipient, whoever they happen to be.

“We’ve always tried to find that intersection between what the recipients of the rewards are looking for and the enterprise that’s giving that reward,” he said. “That’s where choice is so important, so that people behave. You give me something that’s $50 of value; I want to make sure that I get at least $50 of value from that gift card. And there are really, really effective ways to do that.”