Every Day Is Somebody's Holiday

  As the holiday season approaches, we thought we’d turn our attention to a natural topic: gift cards. First, we looked around at the veritable Santa’s bag of published tips and sure-fire ways to promote gift cards for all the gift-giving holidays we celebrate as the year ends. There are tons of those tips, and a lot of them are good.

But we wanted to go beyond the “usual” holiday advice fare. We even wanted to go beyond the usual holidays. Our goal was to create an unusually actionable document. The result is Everyday’s a Holiday: Ways to Increase Gift Card Sales All Year Round.

We focus on holidays other thanthe year-end “Biggies.” We look at some traditional gift giving times (like Valentine’s Day) and at some very untraditional ones (like “National Organize Your Home Office Day”). We dig deep. We establish three categories of holiday, and define specific strategic goals for each. We lay out a precise tactical plan. We reach out to the vendors who might be involved (printers, card makers and sign printers for instance) so we can present accurate cost models. And we do a little math to estimate the volume of incremental gift card sales needed for the programs to be profitable.

Did we make a cookie cutter? No. You won’t be able to copy and paste our numbers into your operations plan. But we do lay out an approach, offer a very specific model for what that approach will take, and share a way to determine program ROI. We’re not trying to make things easy for you by taking all the thinking out of planning a gift card promotion. Instead, we’re hoping to get you thinking more about how you might increase gift card sales all year round.

Both the National Retail Federation and the National Restaurant Association are unequivocal about the fact that people want gift cards and, after department store cards, the gift cards they want most are for restaurants. And it’s that hard fact that we want to help you take advantage of all year round: from Christmas, to Birthdays, to National Positive Thinking Day.