Marketing

The Gift Card Marketing Strategy to Increase Your VOD Sales Year-Round

By James Johnson
8 Min Read
The Gift Card Marketing Strategy to Increase your VOD Sales

Gift-giving is a fundamental part of human relationships. 

It’s one of the best ways we know how to show our love and appreciation for the people we care about — and make them very, very happy. 

So much so, that for every $10 the average American spends, $1 is spent on buying someone a gift. Crazy, right?

So, being the savvy entrepreneur that you are, you’re probably thinking: how can I get in on this action?

Well in this article I’m going to show you exactly how, with a complete gift card marketing strategy.

Let’s go…

The Power Of Gift Card Marketing: How And Why It’s So Effective

Gift card marketing is where you offer and promote gift cards as a way of accessing your product or service. It’s a (relatively) passive form of marketing that allows you to:

  • Convert more customers.
  • Reach a larger audience.
  • Increase customer referrals.
  • Take advantage of seasonal shopping habits.

Better still, they’re an incredibly reliable way to boost your income. Just take a look at this Google Trends data for gift cards over the last 15 years:

gift card search google trends data

There’s continuous growth and demand every single year, with the biggest spikes coming around Christmas or for annual events like Mother’s Day.

And the numbers back this up. Research shows that…

  • 55% of people’s yearly “gifting” budget will be spent on gift cards.
  • 33% of people will spend more on a gift card than an actual gift.
  • 47% of consumers between 18 and 23 prefer to receive gift cards
  • 50% of consumers over up to age 37 are interested in buying gift cards
  • the average consumer spends $59 more than the value of the gift card

…making them an important part of any marketing and growth strategy.

Now, you might be thinking: “this is great traditional retail, but will this work for my video on demand business?”

The short answer? Yes. The long answer? Yes, but you need to market it!

Let me show you what I mean…

KMS On Demand’s Kickass Gift Card Strategy

KMS On Demand is a video on demand platform from Krav Maga Seattle that helps you to learn self-defense techniques from home and get fit in the process.

kms on demand landing page

One of the ways they’ve grown their audience and profits is by using gift card marketing. They do this by identifying occasions throughout the year to promote their gift cards.

Take a look at the Instagram post below. It went out on the 11th of December, a time when people are actively looking to buy gift cards for the holidays:

kms on demand gift card instagram

The post pointed potential customers to a link page in their Instagram bio. Here, they could navigate to their gift card landing page: 

kms gift card landing page

KMS uses this as a sales page to provide all the information their target customer needs to make an informed purchase, like:

  • Video trailers.
  • Content catalog previews.
  • Coach bios.
  • Pricing information.

We really like how KMS presents their gift card options as different months of training, like those you might see at a gym or studio. A clever strategy that will feel familiar to their target audience!

kms gift card strategy

This is a great gift card marketing strategy because it ties in perfectly with their ideal customer demographic, a spike in demand for gifts, and creates a frictionless buying experience.

Having this option available appeals to a number of people. They:

  1. Want to give a digital gift (like access to a VOD platform).
  2. Know the other person uses a service and would like to gift it to them.
  3. Have been asked to gift a specific service.
  4. Need to buy a last-minute gift.
  5. Feel like a service might be a good fit for someone they know.

You could go from seeing their Instagram post to having a hassle-free Mother’s Day gift in less than 5 minutes! Not bad, right?

In the next section, I’m going to show you how to set up a gift card marketing strategy for your VOD business. Let’s go…

How To Create A Gift Card Marketing Strategy

In this section, I’m going to show you how to create a reliable, repeatable gift card marketing strategy. You’re going to:

  1. Identify relevant calendar dates
  2. Plan your marketing materials
  3. Schedule campaigns for your “owned” channels
  4. Explore paid promotion options
  5. Review your analytics for the next campaign/promotion

If you’re a Uscreen customer, the gift card feature should already be active on your dashboard, so you can move through these steps without needing to set anything up!

Let’s get into it…

1. Identify Relevant Calendar Dates

The first step is to review a calendar for the next year (or at least the next quarter) and identify any dates, events, or celebrations that are relevant to your product or brand.

You can use a marketing calendar, like this free one from Sprout Social, to help you find these.

Sprout Social marketing calendar

You ideally want to highlight 2-4 dates per year that you want to market your gift cards around. And, it’s important that all of these dates:

  • Are typically gift-giving holidays or dates.
  • Are relevant to your product, industry, or demographic.

There are some core dates like Christmas, birthdays and even wedding anniversaries that fit every audience. 

Let’s say you run an educational business that teaches technology-based subjects, like Innovalab:

innovalab homepage example

You’d want to look for dates that intersect with gift-giving and your demographic, like a college graduation.

If you feel like you’re clutching at straws to find a relevant date, you should just stick to big recurring annuals events that fit your demographic, for now, like:

  • Christmas.
  • Valentine’s Day.
  • Mother’s or Father’s day.

2. Create Gift Card Landing Pages

The next step is to create a standalone landing page for each of your chosen gift card dates, plus a date-neutral one to include on your website year-round.

This will give you:

  • One general gift card landing page that’s always available on your website.
  • Multiple specific pages you can promote on your marketing channels.

If you’re a Uscreen customer, you’ll find a feature in your Marketing Tools called Landing Pages:

Landing pages marketing tool uscreen

You can use this feature to quickly and easily create sales pages for your gift cards. Those pages serve as a landing page specifically dedicated to selling gift cards to your leads.

Having a specific landing page for each different event is really important because the needs, and mentality, of potential customers changes.

If you’re looking for a gift for your partner for your wedding anniversary, you’ll be in a different emotional place than buying a birthday present for your Dad, for example. 

Getting this right will have a positive impact on your conversion rates. And, if you need any help writing your landing page, here’s a great list of tips from HubSpot

3. Schedule Campaigns For Your Marketing Channels

The third step is to schedule updates to promote your gift cards for all of your marketing channels. 

You’ll want to start your promotions between 14 and 28 days ahead of time. This gives your audience enough time to see the updates and act on them.

Dates like Christmas and Father’s Day will take place on the same day for the majority of your audience. So, you can easily plan and schedule when to start promoting.

I recommend you use a tool like Google Calendar to set a reminder:

google calendar marketing reminders

You can also use scheduling tools for your newsletter and social media channels to have relevant links go out ahead of time, making this an even more passive process!

Here’s a rough guideline for how this might look on social media:

  1. 25 days out: your first ‘hype post’ about the gift card; a quick reminder that the event is coming up and you have something exciting in store. 
  2. 21 days out: create a social post about the gift card. Add CTA links to your posts, and your bios.
  3. 17 days out: publish a reminder post to explain why this is a great gift.
  4. 10 days out: [optional] run a giveaway of a subscription for the event and share links to purchasing the gift card
  5. 5 days out: if you ran a giveaway, announce the winner and share a reminder post about the upcoming event with links to the gift card page
  6. 2 days out: publish a final reminder post. This is the most important to create urgency. Focus on the fact this is their last chance!
  7. Event day: share a “happy [your event]” post

And for your email newsletter, look to send one email per week promoting your gift card:

  • Week 1: talk about the upcoming event and share your gift card as a potential option.
  • Week 2: send an email about relevant gift ideas for the upcoming event and include your gift card as an option. (Eg. 10 Father’s Day Gift Ideas For Artistic Dads) 
  • Week 3: add urgency and mention that it’s only one week until the event, and include a CTA to your gift card
  • Week 4: make a “final call” for the upcoming event with a CTA to your gift card
  • Day before event: send one final email blast to pick up a gift card

If you also send out a weekly non-promotional newsletter, then you could include a link to your gift card as “ps: it’s [event] soon. Why not pick up a gift card?” at the end of your message.

4: Explore Paid Promotions

Paid promotions can be a great way to support your organic promotions, and generate even more income. 

This is especially important if social media is a core part of your strategy, so you can ensure your message is seen by your audience! 

You can use paid advertising to target:

  • People upcoming birthdays or wedding anniversaries.
  • People whose social media connections have upcoming birthdays or anniversaries.
  • Specific subsections of your current audience.
  • People with high-intent outside of your current audience.

Paid ads are a little beyond the scope of this article, so I recommend you take a look at this guide from our resident paid advertising expert, Dana – Paid Advertising For Your VOD.

5: Review Your Analytics For The Next Promotion

After each gift card promotion, it’s a good idea to review your analytics data to see what worked, what didn’t, and what you can do differently next time.

Uscreen’s marketing tools can help you see important information like…

  • demographic data
  • traffic sources
  • conversion rates
  • audience behaviour

…so you can make informed decisions about how to improve your gift card marketing strategy. Better still, you can set up tools like Abandoned Cart Emails to help you make more sales!

Wrapping This Up…

Gift cards can be a great (almost) passive way to grow your income and take advantage of seasonal spikes in demand. 

You can create a gift card marketing strategy by:

  1. Identifying relevant dates: these are times of year where the need to buy a gift intersects with your audience
  2. Creating landing pages: build a landing page for each event’s gift card
  3. Scheduling promotions: on your organic marketing channels, like social media and email newsletters
  4. Exploring paid options: like social media advertising that will send traffic to your landing pages
  5. Reviewing your analytics: use Uscreen’s marketing tools to identify what did and didn’t perform well in your gift card marketing campaign

If you have any questions about using gift cards, don’t hesitate to get in touch with our customer success team to help you further!

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