Don’t miss out on key days and seasons.
Here in the UK, there is a higher demand to buy and receive gift experiences than gift cards. Over the last 5 years, gift experiences and vouchers have grown by 10% as many people now believe that buying experiences and creating memories is more important than material gifts. Experiences can also be shared, allowing these gifts to offer a social and more intimate feel.
Partners buy each other spa days for two, with the idea that they will also get to partake in the experience, and Mother’s Day gifts of afternoon tea vouchers work in the same way. It’s this mentality that we need to use to our advantage - people will always be happy to spend money or be upsold to when they know they will get to enjoy the experience. So… how do we do this? And how do we make sure we are prepared for these peak seasons?
So, if you’re anything like us, you like to be organised and plan ahead of time so you can prepare yourself and your staff for upcoming events and circumstances. It might be that you are looking at an additional revenue stream during a quieter period and therefore want to create something like a ‘Black Friday’ offer, or maybe you know that your FOH team will be inundated with calls and requests for Christmas gifts over the festive period, so need to plan for additional resources. Whatever the reason, you can use your Gifted platform to forward plan and create different offers, campaigns and promo codes well in advance of these peak periods.
You will need to work out what the key dates and peak seasons are for your hotel. For almost everyone, the run-up to Christmas will be extremely busy, with 30% of your annual voucher sales occurring in December alone. But other dates such as Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, Blue Monday, Easter weekend, wedding season (May- July), and many others might have more or less importance to your business.
It is important to ask yourself questions about your customers and your sales. You know your hotel better than anyone, so try to identify the needs within your business and make the most out of the Gifted platform. Do you see a dip in your spa occupancy over the summer? Is it because most of your spa members have children they need to look after? Perhaps a ‘summer spa break’ would be worth creating and promoting, or maybe setting up a promo code for your spa members to welcome them back with a ‘back to school’ promo.
Within Gifted, you have the ability to create an offer or promotion - with as much or as little support from us as you wish. Our team are here to help, but we give you complete freedom and control of your platform. One of our favourite things about Gifted is how easy it is to create offers and how simple it is to schedule them to go live on a chosen start date.
Note - if a voucher is part of an offer, it will no longer be able to be purchased in any other part of the gifted site (for example, ‘Half Price Afternoon Tea in January’ means no other afternoon tea vouchers can be bought whilst the offer is running. We suggest always creating a new voucher that can then be applied to the offer so customers don’t miss out on an experience and you don’t miss out on sales.)
Once you have set up the offer, we recommend a couple of things just to make sure you get as many sales as possible. Firstly, send your offer out to a mailing list - the bigger the reach, the more likely people are to hear about it, and therefore purchase it. By creating an offer as well as just promoting your current offering, you are creating a sense of urgency and causing a bit of a stir. This brings me to my second point - social media. By promoting your gift vouchers on your social profiles, you are giving people the opportunity to find you, search for your property, and share it with their friends.
Gifted will not only help you create the perfect offer to cater for peak periods and buying dates, but with our team on hand to help support, a fulfilment centre dedicated to posting your vouchers, and a platform that can carefully curate a range of gifts and experiences - it offers the perfect solution. You just need to make sure you get an extra member of staff in to handle all the calls and enquiries… as the phone will be ringing off the hook.