Helping businesses through COVID with pay-it-forward voucher and gift card offers
This blog serves as a practical easy-to-follow guide to help businesses survive and prosper through the Coronavirus crisis. It contains simple tutorials showing you how to quickly create voucher and gift card offers which have been demonstrated to deliver results for businesses, helping them to drive pre-paid sales revenue.
Our Account Management team here at VoucherCart have been closely involved with clients globally and across all business sectors in response to COVID-19, assisting in strategic initiatives to drive pre-paid revenue for businesses during these uncertain times.
Working within our Account Management Team within the Hospitality sector Jo Ablett specialises in working with clients to create seasonal optimised voucher promotions.
In today’s blog, Jo turns her focus to COVID revenue strategies aimed at getting businesses through the lean times ahead, by driving revenue into the bank with pre-paid voucher sales.
In the short video below, she provides us with a use-case explainer illustrating some go-to/quick-win voucher sales strategies to help drive revenue into your business quickly and effectively. Although focussed on Coronavirus through the subject matter of today’s blog, the vouchers themselves and the recommended strategy for promotion is applicable at any time and are widely used by clients for Black-Friday/Cyber Monday type offers as well as seasonally throughout the year.
This approach will not only help any business to survive the economic downturn resulting from COVID, but additionally serve well in any economic climate, as a strategy for revenue growth, profit and success. Through coronavirus crisis and beyond.
The voucher options presented in this short video have been chosen for their simplicity and flexibility of use and are almost universally applicable across businesses of all types and in all sectors, focussing on:
- Limited-Time Offers
- Discounted or Extra-Value
- Extended Usage Window (Expiry)
In this blog Jo provides us with a brief synopsis of findings across businesses during the COVID lock-down period so far with key pointers to success observed in campaigns so far.
This is a must-read.
Protecting your businesses from losses though cancellations and refund requests
Rather than concede cancellations and the resultant refunds this entails, simply offer your clients a complimentary voucher in place of a refund, or ask them to pay-ahead for a voucher with extended usage and/or extra-value to help your business.
Alternatives to issuing customer refunds during COVID-19.
Many businesses are reporting high volumes of refund requests relating to pre-paid and deposit secured booking and stays. Whilst issuing a refund may be appropriate in some circumstances, rather than accepting this as your businesses default response, consider offering your customer a COMPLIMENTARY voucher in cases where payment has already been taken, and in cases where it has not, you can suggest their purchase of a voucher for the amount of their booking, with validity up to 3 years. to support your business.
Just select CHARITY or FREE option @ 1:35 in the video example above.
Customer request to cancel an unpaid booking/reservation
The customer has secured a booking or reservation with your business, however no payment has been taken to date.
As opposed to simply accepting the cancellation, offer your customers the option to purchase a voucher with a value add, i.e spend £50 get £65 usable value.
In response to COVID the team at VoucherCart have added a selection of pre-configured vouchers designed for our customers needs during COVID, so you can automatically create this voucher from your dashboard in VoucherCart with just one click, and edit it to suit your needs. In response to COVID,
Promoting your vouchers
The steps below will ensure optimal exposure and maximum revenue from your voucher sales.
Play to your strengths
Step 1: Announce availability of your time-limited COVID promotional offer via email to your EXISTING and known customers from your customer database, providing them with extra-value for their spend, or a discount with extended validity.
Why?: Customers who know you and know your business are the most likely to buy, and with the least delay in their decision making process. If the offer is appealing in terms of it’s extra-value or discounted proposition, your customers will tell their friends, family and colleagues resulting in high quality referral purchases.
There’s an old saying “Birds of a feather. flock together”. This will stand you in good stead here with this strategy as the friends, family and contacts of your existing customers may share similar tastes and interests as they do, and appreciate your product and service offerings as much as your existing customers. That’s new customer acquisition of the RIGHT type of customer for your businesses.
Step 2: Promote your voucher(s) to your social media accounts
Why?: For the same principal reasons as above, you are speaking to a highly relevant and engaged audience many of whom will know and like your business and share or re-tweet your voucher offer(s).
Useful tips and further considerations
Focus on time-limited special offers, with a countdown timer displayed in order to entice your customers to purchase a deal now in order to drive payment to your bank of advance funds during COVID. To address the likely delay in usage enforced by the prevalent Coronavirus conditions, you may choose to set your voucher usage window accordingly. (eg. Set usage window so that the vouchers are not usable until 1st July 2020 and valid for 24 months thereafter. )
Extend Voucher Validity/Usage Window
Ensure continued sales of your current vouchers by simply extending their usage window
See example: Set voucher usage window
Instil buyer confidence by extending expiry dates to up to 3 years, in addition to offering extra value on vouchers.
VoucherCart also allows you to set up discount codes for use across all of your vouchers or a select few.
If you need further assistance simply contact the team via chat from your VoucherCart account dashboard or at help@vouchercart.com.