Raises, promotions, extra time off, these words may be a risky topic for employers to discuss when they are working on a tighter budget than last year. Not to mention looking for employee recognition ideas for more and more employees doing a job well done. Incentive Magazine talks about the “Power of Perks” and how leading organizations are recognizing their value and trying to find how it can fit into their organization.
Finding a way to acknowledge the hard work of your employees as a whole can be as easy and affordable as an office party, and the most important part of a party: office catering. Ever heard the expression, the quickest way to an employee’s heart is through their stomach? Boston Market recognized this and made it easy for employers to feed their workforce on a budget; offering discounted rates on volume purchases of their new Boston Market Catering eGift Card.
Mass employee recognition doesn’t need to be time consuming, expensive, or dreaded. Getting the office together in a social setting helps take some of the stress from the work week off their shoulders and gives employers the chance to celebrate achievements, goals reached and success of the company WITH their employees.
Learn more about the perks and savings of using Boston Market Catering eCertificates for your company’s office catering needs.
The author:
Lauren McAuley is on the marketing team at GiftCard Partners. She is a recent graduate who enjoys diving head first into several aspects of the business including social media, graphic design, marketing, business development and public relations. Her passion for challenging herself keeps her trying new things every chance she gets, vegetable lasagna this week, maybe skydiving next week?
Last week GiftCard Partners’ senior management attended the 2013 Innovation Project at Harvard University, an annual summit that focuses on payment innovation from all angles. Payments experts spoke, including government leaders like Rosie Rios, Treasurer of the United States, and Raj Date, CEO of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, as did payments industry leaders such as Steve Levitt author of Freakonomics, and Don Kingsborough, CEO of Pay Pal.
Attendees learned about how different technologies are innovating payments, and how consumers are adopting innovative payment strategies and vehicles. Technologists spoke about the global infrastructure being built to innovate payments as we move into the future, always keeping in mind where consumers find payment vehicles, with 51% of the American population in possession of a smartphone, and 25% in possession of a tablet. Rosie Rios spoke about how, despite the current importance of cash currency, over the next 10 years the United States Government will move to making 100% of federal payments electronically. These payments include large scale programs like WIC, Social Security, and MediCare programs, and the transition to electronic payments will save the United States $1 billion.
Throughout all of the learning and exchange of information on payment innovation the GCP team was most focused on how these payment innovations will affect the gift card industry. As payments transition and consumers become more accustomed to using electronic forms of payment, gift cards and employee incentives of all kinds will likely follow suit. As these global payment innovations and infrastructures are built to replace cash, will consumers be able to transfer gift cards the same way? Will employers be able to build incentive and rewards programs around these payment innovations? Will your organization be ready for these changes? Let us know by leaving us a comment.
Stay tuned for more notes and opinions from the GCP team on various parts of the 2013 Innovation Project, and for more information on the event check out the summit website.
The author:
Rachel Merkin is a digital marketing professional . She has been exploring the worlds of social media and B2B gift cards since 2006. When she is not blogging, tweeting, or finding ways to leverage Facebook as a marketing tool, she spends as much time at the beach as she can.
A great post from Prepaid Expo; they outline some interesting financial prepaid stats, usages, mobile stats and more. Interesting information about the decline in use of cash; this is a fact that employers can keep in mind when planning employee incentives and rewards. Prepaid and gift cards aren’t just as good as cash…they ARE cash and loaded on mobile devices, they are the cash of the future!
Here are the tidbits most interesting to us, click below for the whole shebang:
- $82 billion. That’s the amount expected to be loaded onto Prepaid cards in 2012.
- Consumers are using prepaid cards as a way to access wages, direct deposits increased by nearly 70% in 2011.
- Mobile POS payments is expected to grow from $362.6 million in 2011 to $1.4 billion in 2017.
- The use of cash is predicted to decline 3% a year until 2015, through 2015, the use of cash will decline by nearly $200 billion.
- Cash point-of-sale purchases is expected to drop to 23% by 2017.
Stacey Sicurella is a 15 year marketing veteran, working in the Boston area for GiftCard Partners. Recent accomplishments include blogging with abandon, acquiring work-life balance and building amazing sand-castles with her children.
The Prepaid Expo tells us in the form of this infographic. We know our retailer and merchant gift card clients struggle with many of these challenges. There are additional challenges for those, like our clients, who are selling their prepaid products in the B2B market, and GCP supports and guides them through these challenges and those that will crop up. What % of these strategies and challenges are you dealing with?
What Keeps Prepaid's CEO's Up at Night
The author:
Stacey Sicurella is a 15 year marketing veteran, working in the Boston area for GiftCard Partners. Recent accomplishments include blogging with abandon, acquiring work-life balance and building amazing sand-castles with her children.
We’ve been writing a lot about how gamification is taking employee motivation and engagement programs by storm, but does the same People + Participation = Productivity[1] theory apply to customer loyalty and incentive programs? Destination CRM.com says YES: “The things that make games so compelling can equally make employees, partners, [and] customers addicted to your B2B or B2C offering.”
And we at GCP are compelled to say YES as well with case studies like this:
Samsung saw impressive boosts in their customer loyalty program via their social loyalty program, Samsung Nation. With the Badgeville gaming platform, they grew their user generated content and website traffic, but more importantly; they achieved financial results as well! “Samsung, in return, saw 66 % more users submitting 447 % more product answers on its global Web site. Even more impressive, the user-generated content prompted 34 % of users to put 224 % more items in shopping carts”, states CRM.com’s article Game On.
The reward is an important aspect of any motivation and incentive program, and since these games can be played online and anywhere in the world, the rewards should also offer international value. Gift cards are a common customer loyalty reward, but onthe international front; GCP offers maxchoice international vouchers. They act like gift cards, but with even more flexibility for international customers. Check out more information on maxchoice premium international vouchers.
Stacey Sicurella is a 15 year marketing veteran, working in the Boston area for GiftCard Partners. Recent accomplishments include blogging with abandon, acquiring work-life balance and building amazing sand-castles with her children.
This is quite possibly the most comprehensive infographic ever created around mobile payments. Our question for the prepaid industry, loyalty rewards program management companies, and gift card retailers and merchants: Is our next loyalty program component in the area of mobile payments use?
Stacey Sicurella is a 15 year marketing veteran, working in the Boston area for GiftCard Partners. Recent accomplishments include blogging with abandon, acquiring work-life balance and building amazing sand-castles with her children.
Longtime Olympic sponsor Visa, and cell phone giant Samsung have combined forces to launch a mobile app that will allow for patrons at the 2012 London Olympics to pay for purchases with a wave of their hand. The Visa payWave technology uses Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology to allow consumers to pay with a wave of their mobile phone, with an approved smartphone at a specially designed mobile payment terminal. Although the technology is limited to consumers who have the approved device, this technology is believed to take less time at POS than any credit card, debit card, or cash transaction. Additionally, statistics from credit card comapnies show that consumers tend to spend more per transaction at mobile payment terminals.
This technology, if it catches on from the global exposure at the 2012 Summer Games, could revolutionize payment systems. Imagine being able to redeem a gift card with a wave of your hand, instead of waiting in line to redeem your gift. The time efficiency and convenience of payment could revolutionize payments, as well as change the way consumers handle their smartphones. Phones could turn into a consumer’s, phone, computer, wallet, and bank all tucked safely into their pocket.
Rachel Merkin is a digital marketing professional . She has been exploring the worlds of social media and B2B gift cards since 2006. When she is not blogging, tweeting, or finding ways to leverage Facebook as a marketing tool, she spends as much time at the beach as she can.
We have written about and highlighted articles on the topic of tablet eCommerce and why they are becoming significant to retail marketing strategies, mostly from the perspective of prompting more retailers and merchants to accept gift cards online. This past Fall, eMarketer Digital Intelligence predicted that by 2014, 1 in 3 customers would use a tablet to make their online purchases. Tablet users will increase, and 1/3 of them will purchase online, whether or not they have ever made online purchases before. But even more importantly, Forrester Research reported that the purchase conversion rate for shoppers using a traditional PC is 3% and 4% or 5% for shoppers using tablets. So, retailers could see an increased lift, simply by the consumers’ choice of online tools. That speaks to the need for retailers to capture those new tablet users as customers.
Are you ready for this? If a gift card holder goes online to purchase with their shiny new tablet; will they be turned away by your website? Will they ever come back? That’s just 1 piece of the tablet pie. Now, tablets aren’t just in the laptop bag or on the desk …they are IN stores, provided by the store! If retailers offer this intriguing, cutting edge technology in stores, more consumers will be introduced to them and begin to feel comfortable with them, and perhaps become more likely to use their tablet at home to make online purchases…This is in-store marketing GENIUS!
In the recent Retail TouchPoints article 5 Ways to Use Tablets For In-store Commerce, we see a plethora of customer friendly tablets are being used in-store by retailers and merchants. “Tablets are here to stay; retailers need to embrace them and strongly consider how they can be used in stores to enhance brand experiences and build brand loyalty.” “Though many retailers are adopting this in-store technology, they’re just starting to scratch the surface of its potential. There are many ways retailers can use tablets to transform the in-store experience.” Says Gary Lombardo, Multichannel, Mobile & Social Commerce Product Marketing Lead, Demandware in the Retail TouchPoints article.
We are excited about these technologies and how retailers and merchants will integrate their gift card programs with their online sales efforts. What other cool ways have you seen tablets used in stores?
The author:
Stacey Sicurella is a 15 year marketing veteran, working in the Boston area for GiftCard Partners. Recent accomplishments include blogging with abandon, acquiring work-life balance and building amazing sand-castles with her children.
The Citi Thank You Program is revolutionizing the use of rewards points. Imagine being able to share points with your friends to save up for a get-away weekend, or save up points with one friend for another friends’ birthday present. Many people pool points for gift cards from retailers who partner with Citi to make their gift cards available through the Citi ThankYou program such as CVS/Pharmacy and Charming Shoppes stores. This allows consumers to use points for gift cards for themselves, or to use as gifts, giving the recipient of the gift a chance to choose their own gift. You could even pool points with friends and family to make a group contribution to a good cause. Well, now you can. The new Citi ThankYou Point Sharing App on Facebook allows groups of friends to pool points in order to redeem the value of the points for a bigger reward.
This app is the beginning of a revolution in monetizing social media. This app is allowing users to move assets and share funds through Facebook, a social media platform. This app will soon promote itself, benefiting not just the Citi ThankYou Program, but its users and potential users as well. The more people use the Point Sharing App, the more people will post on Facebook about it, making the App and its use go viral across the platform.
A rewards program that rewards itself, an incentive social media innovation.
Rachel Merkin is a digital marketing professional . She has been exploring the worlds of social media and B2B gift cards since 2006. When she is not blogging, tweeting, or finding ways to leverage Facebook as a marketing tool, she spends as much time at the beach as she can.
Adopting new technologies as important as your wallet isn’t as easy as Google saying “NOW…GO!”.
Embracing a mobile wallet also isn’t just about spending on your credit cards, it’s about embracing technology to spend the money you already have, on prepaid cards like all those gift cards we received for the holidays. Fraud is also on the minds of consumers, bulk gift card givers, retailers, and merchants.
So, what will facilitate the use of mobile prepaid on the technology and consumer sides? Check out this series of interviews from the PREPAID EXPO with Jonathan Treiber of RevTrax.
frameborder="0" allowfullscreen>
The author:
Stacey Sicurella is a 15 year marketing veteran, working in the Boston area for GiftCard Partners. Recent accomplishments include blogging with abandon, acquiring work-life balance and building amazing sand-castles with her children.
Raises, promotions, extra time off, these words may be a risky topic for employers to discuss when they are working on a tighter budget than last year. Not to mention looking for employee recognition ideas for more and more employees doing a job well done. Incentive Magazine talks about the “Power of Perks” and how leading organizations are recognizing their value and trying to find how it can fit into their organization.
The author:
The author:
The author:
