13 eCommerce Gift Card & Voucher Strategies for Driving Sales (2025)

💬 Incorporating gift cards/vouchers can help with a few areas of the business to help drive sales/revenue - incl. the likes of being options for gifts for existing customers to share with friends/family/colleagues, a good alternative for offers for TOF/MOF (especially during key seasonal sales periods, like Christmas), use as part of special offers aligned with certain categories to clear stock faster, and to use for other areas as well (which I touch on through the various checklist points below).

Different optimisations and tactics to try for using vouchers/gift cards to drive eCommerce revenue/sales

💬 Across some of the checklist points, I included a couple of tool recommendations (with each of them being low-cost to test), as well as reference examples for inspiration.

Gift card and vouchers are an awesome offer to drive to audiences as part of early-mid promotion periods when a big upcoming campaign sales period is coming up - like Black Friday, Christmas, etc.

Promoting personalised campaigns with gift card/voucher recommendations can encourage more earlier purchases, where current customers/subscribers can buy in advance as presents for family/friends.

Here are some ideas/examples for promotion of vouchers/gift cards

Each of them are emails, but I like the angle, copy and designs of each and thought it'd help as inspo. :)

#1 -Adun promo email

• Great layout/design of the email - clear offer at the top (10% off), and love the idea for the section "Only shop this sale if..."

#2 - Winc promo email

• Great offer email for Valentine's Day by Winc - like the incl. of a clear gift card illustration, and also clear headline for the promo (and code)

#3 - Beysis

• Love the copy here and angle for "last minute" buyers (we've all been there haha) - including the USP icons is great placement under the CTA to remind those reading

#4 - Popsmith

• Aside from awesome branding/design, I like the "referral" type offer here, where a customer can get a nice incentive for buying a gift card for a friend.

This is a particularly important checklist point to make - especially if you're looking to have multiple tiers, rewards, and other integration possibilities (like I mention in the next checklist point with loyalty/rewards systems).

Plus, I'm a fan of using cost-effective software to provide a seamless UX for both customers and even the business side.

In terms of software recommendations, here are two options:

#1 - Rise ai

• Rise has a great UX and UI, which are great for both consumers/customers, and also as Shopify merchant users
• You can do personalised emails with balance check, multi-store redemptions, etc
• Lots of easy admin controls, like disabling, etc
• You can create custom cards at scale in 1-click
• "1 out of 5" is an impressive stat and certainly can see why

Check out more about Rise here

#2 - Giftnote

• You can easily personalise custom cards and have them delivered by SMS/email.
• I like the ability to automate sends via scheduling
• Good analytics available to see performance
• Also good UX for customers to check their balance - and you can ensure to customise branding with your store

Check out more about Giftnote here

Similar to perk offerings that you would create for volume product purchases and/or order value over time, reward points for those who buy gift cards.

For example, why not offer bonus points for cards? And why not add a tiered incentive based on the value of the card/voucher?

You can look into the likes of Rise memberships for this - some really good features worth checking out!

There are a few different strategies/tactics you could try here for winback campaigns, such as:

• Personalised "comeback" offers/incentives (and they certainly work for winning some segments back from experience) - this could be the likes of; birthday month special vouchers, season-specific gift cards offers, anniversary of first purchase rewards (this works I've seen), etc
• You can setup automated triggers for tiered re-engagement offers (which can work quite well) - for example, 30-day inactive =$10 gift card, or 60-day inactive =$30 gift card. In many ways they're like coupons, but the angle of gift cards has more weight I've found.
• You can do "surprise & delight" offers - for example, holiday season surprise rewards, "We miss you!" unexpected gift cards, and for those part of loyalty programs, can do 'loyalty point conversion to gift cards' reminders (which is a great initiative to consider) - people always forget that have points that they can use as cash/credit on store (I know I do haha).

Hopefully some ideas that can help here. :)

Then in terms of some examples, I found a couple for inspo:

#1 - Heyday

• Great spend-tier level offer from Heyday

#2 - Wildist

• Another solid email example here from Wildist - love the breakdown at the top for the main promo, and also like the remaining structure and content for the rest

Rather than just doing "normal 10/15% off" discounts (which I feel so many brands do), you want to stand out with a great offer, and that's where I feel gift cards to encourage signups are better, and can help with conversions.

In my view, gift cards/vouchers have better perceived value - in many ways, vouchers/gift cards feel like "free money" rather than a discount. I also like them because it helps maintain brand premium positioning (better than just 'discounting' all the time), and also helps create a "burning pocket" effect (as people/consumers want to use them).

As one final takeaway from what I've seen from experience, customers typically spend more than the gift card value (this is a good test to run for your store).

A potential incentive tactic as part of driving social/viral competition entries (and referral sharing) is to provide not just gift cards/vouchers as prizes, but also "instant wins".

As a quick example - what you could potentially do is provide "instant $10 voucher wins on your next purchase" for anyone who enters - it's just an alternative offer type compared to the normal "here's 10% off when you sign up to the newsletter. All I've changed here is the offer angle to motivate more entrants.

This is more for brands to consider when it comes to corporate gifting programs - and this could be a smart B2B eCommerce play to get more enterprise-level clients who'd purchase vouchers in bulk.

As an interesting test/experiment to think about, offer vouchers and test against normal product items as part of post-purchase upsells.

For instance, you could highlight a promotion that customers can get the value of a $100 voucher, for the price of $85 if they add within the upsell timed period - so in other words, customers can save $15 if that make that decision there and then.

A great solution for doing post-purchase upsells with any incentive from your store is Aftersell.

Somewhat stating the obvious here, but I've come across brands where I enquired (double checked) whether or not there was the option to purchase gift cards or vouchers, and they said yes - but I couldn't find it anywhere on the site (and I looked hard).

Treat it just like you have another product available - make it evident either in the footer or key collection pages. During key promotional periods, consider adding it in within the main nav bar, homepage banner, or anywhere on the site which is more evident.

And the same goes for key marketing channels, such as email flows - you can promote as the main email content, but of course you can't keep promoting it all the time as the main content. So for example, add it as a CTA towards the footer of emails so audiences/customers become more aware.

Here are a couple of examples I like from brands:

#1 - Universal Store

• Universal Store have done a good job with making it 'obvious' to guide users to gift cards in the footer, and also really like their landing page UX to choose two different types.

#2 - Felix Gray

• Another good place to make it obvious is via email CTAs, just like what Felix Gray has done above. :)

If you're wanting to drive more gift card/voucher sales where channels like email and SMS aren't performing as well (not in the way you hoped), then a good way to get more distribution and awareness that these exist with your brand is through influencers and UGC creators.

Not just helping provide awareness/reach, but also great for giving more credibility and reasons on why customers should purchase gift cards/vouchers for their friends - i.e. have content shared about present ideas, etc.

Consider partnering with other brands for cross-promotion efforts to get more awareness about your offering.

Additionally, why not team up to create a custom gift card/voucher offer together?

For example, if you're an athletic brand and your partner brand does fitness studios, why not create an "lifestyle bundle card"?

Lots of different combinations you could think of in your context - always happy to jam on ideas over email one time. :)

This is a bit more left-field, but if it makes sense for your brand, consider offering gift cards/vouchers for partner brands that do subscription boxes, so your brand can get more awareness to new audiences.

Of course, there's a bit involved in trying to get something to work, but it's an initiative to consider.

There are numerous reasons as to why this is important for brands to consider - especially for cashflow/bottom line reasons/considerations.

I won't get in the specifics of that, but I think offering  gift cards instead of cash refunds can be a win-win for everyone, especially when communicated properly and even attaching a special one-time offer.

It's way faster than waiting for bank processing, and you can sweeten the deal with perks like free shipping or early sale access.

Plus, I've seen brands offer really cool "choose your refund" options where customers can pick between regular cash back or voucher (like credit in many ways - just positioning difference).

Whatever you choose, you just want to ensure to give a good customer experience - however, ultimately, if customers want cash back, certainly need to do in order to not provide a bad CX. But, there are options to think about. :)