Gift Cards Vs Physical Gifts: Where should your iGaming Business focus its incentive marketing

If you’re running any incentive marketing campaigns, new customer acquisition strategies or loyalty reward programs for your iGaming business, you’ll know there’s one big decision you always have to make: 

What type of incentives should we offer? 

Everyone likes to get an actual gift in their hands – something substantial to open and use – but physical rewards can be problematic to order, store and ship. You can’t be sure what your players will want. 

Besides, you’re an iGaming company. Your players play online, you’re a digital innovator – won’t your players want digital rewards? 

It’s a tough decision to make. Should you offer gift cards or physical gifts? 

The traditional challenges with physical gifts 

Despite the tangible psychological benefits of physical gifts, many iGaming incentive marketing programs overlook them because of the traditional challenges.

Challenges like: 

What to order 

If you have to bulk order physical gifts for your incentive marketing, you need to decide well in advance what types of rewards your players might want. You have to guess, and hope that you don’t over order on those gifts that go unclaimed, or under order on those that prove popular and sell out. 

It’s easy to either disappoint players or be left with stockpiles of gifts in the wrong colour or wrong size. 

Where to store 

When you’re ordering in advance, you need somewhere to store all those physical gifts. Hundreds and hundreds of boxes, stacked in your office, taking up valuable space. Or you have to pay for warehousing space – which adds another logistical challenge when you need to retrieve gifts for fulfilment. 

How to ship 

And then there’s the added cost and time of delivering physical gifts. You need packaging materials, shipping partners and a whole host of logistics in place to make sure you can get the right incentive to the right player without any mishaps. You’ll need to consider customer service arrangements too, to deal with any ordering errors or delivery issues. 

The benefits of gift cards

With all the perceived challenges of physical gifts, gift cards seem much more enticing for your incentive marketing program. 

With gift cards, you don’t need to worry about identifying the right gifts. You let your players choose for themselves. 

You don’t need to worry about shipping or storage logistics. You can simply share digital gift cards online. 

And you don’t need to worry about unclaimed stock, out of date rewards or incorrect gifts. All you need is a budget to assign monetary values to gift cards any way you’d like. 

But is there something missing? 

The problems with gift cards

While on the surface gift cards look like a simple solution for all your iGaming incentives, there’s something lacking. 

Gift cards aren’t a real gift 

When you give a gift card to your players as a reward, your players still don’t have a gift. They just have a coupon to buy something. Essentially a ‘money off’ voucher. 

It’s still good, and your players will appreciate the free money, but there’s nothing tangible about a gift card. 

There’s delayed gratification 

Because your players don’t have anything to hold or use when they get a gift card, the gratification’s delayed. They have to wait for their real reward. 

They’re easy to lose

Another challenge with gift cards is they’re all too easy to misplace – even those that are issued digitally. They could get lost in inboxes and expire before a player gets around to using them.

They might not be associated with your brand. 

As gift cards can sit unredeemed for a while, you might find that your players end up thinking and feeling like they’re just buying an item themselves. The product they use the gift for may not be associated with your iGaming company. 

With gift cards, you won’t earn the same level of brand goodwill as a physical incentive. 

Which is why… 

There’s a better way to reward players with physical gifts 

There’s a way to offer a huge range of physical gifts without all the traditional challenges associated with them. 

A way to combine the ease of gift cards with the benefits of physical gifts. 

A better way to run your incentive marketing campaigns with Gift & Go. 

With Gift & Go, your iGaming company can: 

• Reward players with real, relevant gifts without worrying about storage or shipping logistics (with automated fulfilment from Amazon Prime)
• Offer a huge range of gifts directly from Amazon Business without needing to order in advance or worry about unclaimed rewards 
• Give players the types of gifts they want – with quick redemption, instant gratification and great brand association. 

With Gift & Go, your iGaming company can eliminate all the wasted time and admin of incentive marketing, streamline redemption processes and give players real, physical gifts. 

It’s just as easy as offering a gift card, but so much more effective. 

Want to find out how? 

Apply for a free trial or book a demo and claim your free gift.