Offering gift cards for purchase in your salon is beneficial, no, necessary for the ultimate guest experience! However, the days of hand written paper gift certificates are long gone, and clients expect and deserve a modern alternative. In this blog post, we’re not only going to give you a refresh on the benefits of selling gift cards in your salon, but also give you some great ideas on how to offer digital gift card purchases as well as some tried and true gift card promotions!
HOW GIFT CARDS CAN BENEFIT YOUR SALON BUSINESS
Selling gift cards in your salon/spa can be beneficial for a myriad of reasons. First and foremost, your guests want to have the option to purchase them for themselves, or their friends and family. This either guarantees a future visit with said client or encourages new guests to come and try your salon with their gift card! On that note, gift cards are also an excellent way to increase sales over the holidays (we’ve got some cool ideas on this, keep scrolling to read more!)
On top of that, selling either modern plastic gift cards or having digital purchasing options creates an great, professional first impression for potential clients. A well run gift card operation in your salon is all pros, and we’re going to give you some amazing tips on how to execute your own digital gift card offerings.
HOW TO OFFER DIGITAL GIFT CARDS IN YOUR SALON
Before you consider adding digital gift cards for purchase in your salon, it’s important you have all your bases set up. This means some type of tracking system with gift card numbers and dollar amounts on them. It’s also imperative to remember that gift cards aren’t just free money to increase cash flow, and to avoid getting yourself in trouble down the road, you may consider having a separate account to put gift card money into until said gift card is used in the salon! Once you’ve got a solid system set up, then you can dive in to offering digital gift cards.
If you have an online shop, you can set up your inventory with different gift card amount options with corresponding card numbers to keep track of the card when the guest uses it in salon. If you’d like to take the guess work out of it, Salon S.O.S has an amazing E-commerce platform with options for gift card sales- take a peek at this service here!
You may also consider offering digital gift cards on social media, available for purchase through DM’s. Same goes as with e-commerce gift cards, make sure you have a tracking system with corresponding gift card numbers to ensure a smooth transaction in salon!
We recommend using Canva to create gorgeous, custom, digital gift cards for your clients to purchase. The beauty of a digital gift card is that there is no need to purchase physical copies, therefore sky is the limit for how many gift card themes/designs you create! We’ve got some holiday/special occasion inspiration for you to use in your salon’s digital gift card creation, keep scrolling!
GIFT CARD IDEAS FOR SPECIAL OCCASIONS
Think of some of your favourite retailers and the adorable special occasion gift cards they offer, doesn’t it get you excited to gift the card you’ve purchased to the receiver?! Starbucks in particular does an incredible job of this as they have seasonal gift cards, holiday gift cards, and special occasion gift cards with beautiful designs. As we mentioned above, with digital gift cards, there’s no limit to how many designs you can create as you don’t need to purchase them and have them on hand! So without further ado, here are a few gift card ideas that will get your salon guests excited to purchase!
Birthday
Holiday (Easter, Thanksgiving, Valentine's Day, Christmas etc)
Just Because
Personalized gift cards for different occupations (example: teacher, nurse, office workers etc)
Thank You
Thinking Of You
Humorous cards with funny sayings
SALON GIFT CARD PROMO IDEAS
Everyone loves a good gift card promotion and our favourite way to offer this in salon is to include bonus dollars on gift card purchases! It’s great to incentivize larger gift cards amounts with higher bonuses, we’ll give you an example on what this looks like:
Buy a $50 gift card, receive $5 bonus
Buy a $100 gift card, receive $15 bonus
Buy a $250 gift card, receive $40 bonus
Buy a $500 gift card, receive $100 bonus
And so on, and so forth. When creating your “bonus dollar” structure, you want to make sure that you’re comfortable with the dollar amount that you are gifting as to not lose out on profit. These types of gift card sales are great to offer as they incentivize current clients to purchase as a way of saving on future services, as well as enticing to new guests to save on their first service! We don’t recommend running these promotions frequently as they lose their novelty, but they are great to run once or twice a year to create excitement!
For even more salon promo ideas, give this blog post a read!
CONCLUSION
You will be shocked at the revenue that can can come from simply offering digital gift cards for your salon/spa. Offering digital gift card options is so beneficial in this day and age as it gives customers the opportunity to purchase from the comfort of their own computer or phone, which provides convenience and instant gratification. We can’t wait to see the digital gift card MAGIC you create for your salon/spa!
For your daily dose of all things digital marketing for your salon, give us a follow on Instagram and TikTok @salon.s.o.s
‘Til next time,
Your Team At Salon S.O.S.