How Gift Vouchers Increase Customer Spend and Improve Client Retention

Marketing is extremely important to the succession of every business. For those of you that regularly follow our feed, we have wrote a lot of blogs in the past offering our advice and pointers to help you with your marketing strategies. There are many different ways in which to advertise your brand and promote your goods & services, and one that we haven’t highlighted in some time is gift vouchers.

It seems like such a simple topic to discuss, and you would think that a lot of people already have a gift voucher system implemented within their business, but you would be surprised how many don’t and you could be missing out on a simple opportunity. Obviously, there is a small outgoing for the design and manufacture of your gift vouchers, however once you weigh this up against other marketing tactics, you’ll find that the cost isn’t that expensive in comparison. The plus point with gift vouchers is, you are usually getting a direct return on that marketing cost as those customers will visit the salon as a result of receiving a voucher. Especially if this is a new customer, it is a great way to acquire new clients for your salon database.

So what are our main reasons for why we think you should introduce a gift voucher scheme?

Boosts Brand Awareness & Increases Up-selling

Your gift vouchers are a direct representation of your brand, a visual marketing product, and therefore they need to clearly include your company motto and logo to generate brand awareness. Especially for new customers, they need to be able to clearly identify your company in order to be able to recognise it in the future.

Gift vouchers are predominantly purchased as gifts for other people by your customers. However, you have to promote your gift vouchers in order for your clients to be aware that you actually offer them. The displaying of those is something that you have to think about, as you’ll find a lot of the time customers are more inclined to make impulse purchases of gift vouchers if they are displayed somewhere directly in their eye-line.

Cash desks are a brilliant way to up-sell your gift vouchers, as you catch the client post-treatment, in which hopefully this was a positive visit with you and therefore this could be your opportunity to sell! Create a script for your staff members to prompt the offering of a gift voucher to all customers. Ask the customer if they have a birthday coming up, or an event that they need a gift for? We know sometimes, sales scripts can be a bit deterring for staff, and therefore to improve the action of this, why not run a mini incentive between your therapists. Maybe offer a prize for the highest amount of gift vouchers sold per month?

Boost Your Profits

Gift vouchers often entice people in to the salon to purchase something, especially if they are a regular customer and usually spend a lot of money with you. With a gift voucher, for long-standing customers it’s almost as if they are getting their usual treatment for free. And so this time they might purchase that little extra retail product with their own money that they maybe wouldn’t normally do, this evidently increasing your sales. If the client holding the gift voucher is a new customer, this is great too as in most cases, the chances are the customer will purchase more with you than the actual value of the voucher itself.

Increase the amount of New Customers

A main aim of any business is to generate and acquire new customers, to improve company succession year on year. Your marketing strategy plays a large part in that, and we believe gift vouchers really add to client retention.

As we have just mentioned, the majority of people whom receive your gift cards may be unfamiliar with your business, and this could be their reason to try out your salon services. It is therefore important to ensure that your products and services are clearly visible for this potential new client to see. Make sure that your product lists are up to date on all of your social networks. If you already have a website, ensure that there are client testimonials on there, to promote your good work in the past. Make sure you highlight the links to your website and social media pages on the voucher itself. This prompts the client to go and visit those pages, in which another plus point is if you offer online booking, they may just arrange their appointment there and then.

Customised Promotions

What sort of gift voucher do you want to offer? Typical vouchers go up in denominations of £10, so for example £10, £20 to £50. However, what about offering specific vouchers dependent on the time of year, or to tie-in with an event? Say you do a charity event, and for all sales you make you donate a particular amount of that profit to charity. Why not create percentage-off coupons as an incentive for clients to make those larger purchases at those events?

Another simple idea would be to create a money off coupon for your quieter times of the year. For example, once the Bank Holidays are over, maybe offer a free £5, or £10 gift voucher for customers to redeem against all services that are over £50. Or when it comes to the quieter period after Christmas, run something similar where you could offer a small money-off coupon to all clients who book an appointment before the end of Jan?

Money-off vouchers tend to actually make the client buy more with you, as if they usually spend say £50/£60 at the salon, but you’re offering them £10 off, they may then just add on a small retail product for that price as potentially they are getting that free. If that is the case, it means that they will actually end up spending the same amount of money with you that they normally would, or potentially a little bit more.


If you would like any further information on how we can help you with your gift vouchers, request your FREE demo & trial at http://bit.ly/RGeGVd or call our office on 0113 350 8230. We can design the vouchers in house for you and implement those in to your salon software programme.

Hope to hear from you soon!

Salon Tracker x