Online Gift Certificates with a Personal Touch
Let’s say your business offers a beautiful and treasured destination. Your customers head out to your property to retreat and enjoy your accommodations, spa treatments, restaurants and relaxation. How can you make it easier for your customers to purchase gift certificates without having to travel to your location? How can you help your customer personalize the gift?
In this case study, we look at how Balgownie Estate’s customers can purchase, gift certificates, personalize them, and send them to their recipients—all done online. To enable this functionality, their web developers – Foote Francis modified the Joomla CMS (Content Management System), F2 SignUp (order processing), F2 CRM (Customer Relationship Management) and F2 PDF (assembles data into PDFs) for balgownieestate.com.au.
Balgownie Estate has two vineyard properties that have resort accommodations and are located about an hour’s drive from Melbourne, Australia. The wine region locations are frequented as a popular escape from the city. There are a variety of luxury services at the two vineyard locations including guest houses, restaurants, and spa services.
Harmonizing Gift Giving and Convenience
Many visitors of Balgownie Estate come to celebrate special occasions such as birthdays, anniversaries and engagements. In the past, people who wanted to purchase a gift certificate would need to call and order it by phone. They would also want to add a personal message with the gift. What Balgownie Estate wanted was the ability to let purchasers have the convenience of sending an online gift certificate that could have personalized messages added to the certificate.
Foote Francis was able to easily add gift certificate items and message services to Balgownie Estate’s existing F2 CRM (Customer Relationship Management system) and F2 SignUp (ordering system). Balgownie Estate provided their own photographs and artwork to incorporate into the background of the gift certificate.
The gift certificates are set up as items inside F2 SignUp (ordering system) and a form is attached to each gift-certificate product. When a customer chooses the gift certificate, he or she adds the recipient’s name and adds a personalized message. At the end of the online purchasing process, F2 PDF merges the personalized message with Balgownie Estate’s custom background pictures and layout. The result is a personalized gift certificate that has a unique serial number and is emailed to the recipient.
Setting up gift certificate forms was cost effective for Balgownie Estate. The F2 CRM system is flexible and Foote Francis was able to quickly add the gift certificate forms and their labour cost was easily offset by the first month’s gift certificate purchases. Additional benefits include having easy access to the history of the transaction and consolidating the purchaser’s and gift recipient’s contact details into the existing F2 CRM. Repeat customer’s details are not duplicated, the gift certificate purchase or receipt is appended to their existing contact history.
Balgownie Estate’s staff can locate gift certificate details by customer name, purchase date or gift certificate type, such as gift certificates for the restaurant. Balgownie’s staff is grateful for the ability to print lists of unused gift certificates with customer names because it helps them easily track open gift certificates.
What makes the online gift certificate system so powerful is that it can be easily modified to fit the business needs, the gift giver’s and gift user’s behavior. By default, the gift certificates are offered in predetermined values such as $20, $50 and $100. However, the staff has the option of changing some or all of the gift certificates to a variable value where the purchaser can put any dollar amount they wish to give.
Cost Recovered in the First Month
What was most impressive about the online gift certificate system was how Balgownie realized its return on investment. Balgownie Estate’s first month’s sales of online gift certificates completely covered the cost of setting up the online gift certificate systems. In addition to financial return, Balgownie’s loyal customers responded that they liked maintaining the personal touch with the online gift certificates and sharing them with their family and friends.
Setting up the online gift certificates only took a couple days and a few hours of labour from Foote Francis, because the F2 CRM system has a flexible form option. The forms can be tied to specific products and are only displayed when a buyer selects that product. For example, a buyer is only asked for a recipient's name and personal message when the buyer picks a gift certificate.
As Balgownie’s staff continues to get feedback from the gift givers and recipients, or when new photos and graphic themes are developed, the staff has the option to update the certificates on their own or have Foote Francis maintain the certificate templates for them.
If you and your customers need a flexible system to customize your online products, talk to Hayden at Foote Francis about your needs at (AUS) +61 8 9228 9288 or through Foote Francis' website.
References
Online Gift Certificates with a Personal Touch by Hayden Foote is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License
