Our Valentine's Day Promotion: Behind the Scenes

Before today, we had a very simple online gift certificate sales system. It looks like this: CLICK HERE. Our gift cards are made from Vistaprint business cards with the appointment reminder back side changed up to look more like a gift card. (250 for $3.99 versus paying $1+ per gift certificate elsewhere on the same site).

Marble Falls Massage Therapy Center Gift Cards

Being the size of a business card makes for really cool gift presentations (in flower arrangements, greeting cards, stuffed animals, etc). Plus smaller size also makes it easy to keep in your wallet, which clients report they appreciate.

Our system is very simple. Our website has a main page dedicated to purchasing gift certificates. This page shows an image of each gift certificate with a PayPal button underneath with a simple form for the purchaser to complete "To & From" prior to check out. Once we received the e-mail of their payment we mailed the appropriate gift certificate and new client brochure to the recipient specified during check out. This gave us contact information for both purchaser and recipient that went into our database for future marketing promotions.

It works okay. What we found is that people like to wait until the last minute to purchase gift certificates for Holidays and 90% of the time a gift certificate purchased online and put in the mail will miss it's intended deadline. So we end up needing someone in the office for clients to swing by and pick up the gift certificates they purchased online. Online gift certificates sales are supposed to be more convenient than in-store gift certificate sales. That's the whole point.

A lot of massage businesses take advantage of printable gift certificates on their websites. And I started to look into this more and more. So we are trying something new today and tomorrow. Sticking to what I know and understand (very little on the interwebs), I stuck with my handy dandy PayPal buttons. I created a new internal page on my website for a special Two Day Couples Massage Sale with a PayPal button for the offer amount. In the programming of the PayPal button code I have it written to redirect to a hidden page on my website upon completion. This hidden page has a large image of a blank Gift Certificate partially completed with the item on sale (in this case a One Hour Couples Massage), the expiration (one year from Valentine's Day), and my authorizing signature.

After the purchaser prints their gift certificate they can personalize the card with the To: and From: sections. Going from buying to printing to gifting in seconds! Now, there is nothing unique about the gift certificate image on this page and nothing stopping someone from printing a million of them. To ensure a gift certificate coming in for redemption has actually been paid for I have included a line on the gift certificate image that says "Email Used At Check-Out". If a gift certificate is missing this line it can not be redeemed.

We've promoted this new concept on our facebook and to our email contact list. I'll post a follow up blog to let everyone know if it was successful. 

Their is also a note about how I would like for them to schedule and our cancellation policy on the gift certificate image.