October was a record month for Rewards Come True with sales of corporate gift cards and eftpos gift cards up across all sectors.  If you are looking for some inspiration to drive your business, read on…

Staff Rewards:
We began the count-down to Christmas in October, which resulted in a marked increase in orders for staff reward eftpos gift cards in preparation for staff Christmas parties. Employee rewards accounted for 61% of the eftpos gift cards we provided.
We also had several clients prepare to make the move from depositing end of year bonuses straight into bank accounts to using corporate gift cards – more on this next month
We had steady sales for eftpos gift cards as incentives for call centre staff, staff training and service & recognition rewards.

Customer Rewards
Our eftpos gift cards are used for too many consumer promotions to mention, with 28% of October cards being used for these activities.  Most common in October were cashback promotions and customer cross-sell programs.
One of our long term clients is continuing to see fantastic response rates by using our eftpos gift cards together with Direct Mail to stimulate cross-sales within his extensive database. Because we can send our cards “unloaded”, our client only has to pay for reward dollars to those customers that finalise their cross-sell sign up. In A/B testing, direct mail pieces with a card attached have achieved up to 4 times the response rate compared to mail without a card attached.

We were thrilled to be able to introduce some of our new clients to our 12 month activation period on all our eftpos gift cards, ensuring their customers had every opportunity to use their reward.

Trade Incentives:
Channel and Trade Rewards offer a myriad of possibilities for driving your business if you can creatively stimulate behaviour at various touch-points in the channel. In October, we saw clients use a mixture of both our single load eftpos gift cards as well as our reloadable corporate gift cards to:

• Stimulate Target Performance
• Reward for Purchasing a wider range
• Encourage Promotion Uptake
• Reward for Exclusive Ranging/Catalogue Ranging
• Product Activation

Trade and Channel rewards accounted for 11% of the eftpos gift cards we provided in October with a large percentage of the dollar rewards being loaded onto cards for our long term reloadable program participants.

A highlight for us in this segment in October was being able to save one of our new client’s hours in administration by handling the packaging, delivery and fulfilment across the whole country by being able to effectively manage their recipient database and introducing matching and packaging procedures.
November is again shaping up to be staff reward centric but we are also seeing a lot of competitions and promotions launched earlier in the year coming to fruition which sees us providing a range of customer eftpos cards . Tune in next month for more highlights.