Gift Cards Without the Cheap Feeling: How to Sell Them Like a High-End Offer

Welcome to aesthetic pulse, where we help passionate and carrying aesthetic practice leaders get clarity around what is and what is not working and marketing. So get out your pen and paper because we are here to open the hood and show you how you can take actionable steps to improving your aesthetic practice. We are thrilled you're here. Hello, hello, hello, and welcome back to the aesthetic pulse podcast. This is Andrea and this is Teresa and today we have such a fun topic where we are going to lay a little fire under your seat. I'll say because we want to talk about gift cards because a lot of you guys do gift card sales for Black Friday which is super smart to do gift card sales and I think we've talked about that before but just the importance of being able to offer a promotion that serves everybody and that's something that other people can buy for other people and something that doesn't need to be rendered the day of and it's not limited spots and you don't have to be there working to provide it all of those things. So gift cards are really an amazing offer to do for Black Friday. Or even just during the holidays in general even just then, too, yeah, I agree with you. But this episode we're going to talk about how to do gift cards without them being cheap feeling and how to sell them like a high end offer. Gift cards, we've seen clients sell, I think last year one of our done for you clients sold over $40,000 of gift cards. Yeah, it was incredible. So it is a huge revenue opportunity for you but sometimes the way we present them makes it feel like it's a $25 Applebee gift card. So we all have those in our wallet and it's so important because a $25 Applebee gift card is not what you're trying to sell here. Most of you people are purchasing hundreds of dollars on these. If not more, I mean we have some clients that usually sell $2,000 gift cards. So the presentation of that should match the price tag, you know, so and I do want to say too, like just I'm just going to use skin better as an example. But the skin better boxes are super high end. Like when you get a product from skin better and you open it, it's like, oh my gosh. Or like if you buy a new iPhone, the boxes are super high end and like the presentation of the thing you bought feels so high end compared to shoot. If you go to Target and buy like the face wash I use, it's not even in a box. It says a sticker on it. No, it's a sticker on it and you throw it in the bag where as, you know, can you imagine just picture this, if you went to go buy a new iPhone, you actually go into Apple and they put it in a, in like a trash bag, like a Walmart bag and get it to my ears, yeah. How would that feel? And I know where we can like joke and be like dramatic about the examples, but we really want you thinking of that because if you're giving them a luxurious experience, if you're providing luxurious service, that does make a difference in how you feel. And I love that you brought up skin better because I agree. Like opening the box feels like I'm a queen. Like I really do. I open the box and I'm like, ooh, like it's like, almost don't want to throw the back away. The sometimes I don't because I like it so pretty. So like when you have a presentation like that, it matters. And that's not to say like, are people still going to buy gift cards from you probably, but can you imagine if someone came to you and they're like, I really want to buy a gift card for my mom and you make it look absolutely stunning. They're going to want to come back the next year. So that's kind of what we're trying to dive into here. Yes. Okay. So we're going to go through five simple ways to make your gift cards actually feel like a luxury gift that someone's excited to give. And this actually does matter because your client isn't just buying a gift card. They're buying a gift that they want to physically hand someone sometimes. Not all the time. They have like die hard clients that just want the discount, but some people are doing it to physically hand someone a gift. So if they spend 500 bucks and we hand them like a flimsy piece of paper or worse, we just say, oh, we'll email it over to you. It just doesn't feel like they bought a $500 gift. You know, so we kind of want to match that. So a luxury presentation is something that would make it feel more valuable. It makes your medspot look more premium. It gives the gift giver like a feeling of pride to give that gift. It creates a really great first impression with potential brand new clients. And it can make a higher gift card amount easier to sell. So think about like luxury retail. I was just thinking about this as you were talking that one time. My mother-in-law bought us all Ralph Lauren beach towels like all of my family got matching beach towels. And they came in the most beautiful boxes. I still have all of them under my bed. Oh my gosh. That's amazing. Or like you'll see an influencer that's like, I'm buying my first Chanel bag and it's like they're walking out of there and that bag is insanely like over the top, you know. It's not just like a, even like a dillard's exact they're like throwing something in two. It's sturdy. It's beautiful. People are like, they have pride walking around the, you know, the shopping mall when they have something like that. Okay, so let's go into the idea number one, which is we just got to do this first before anything. You need to actually create a beautiful gift card itself. We don't want it just on like a piece of white paper with maybe your logo and like a mount 500, right? So you want to print gift certificates. That are stunning. So you can't have them just on regular printer paper. We really want you to get really thick card stock paper, okay? And you can even do like texture paper. You can have foil details. You can do embossing. You can do so many cool things, but you want to make sure that you have really pretty typography. Make sure it's branded to you. So make sure it's in your brand colors because can you imagine how confusing that would be if someone got a gift card and it's like completely brand a different than your branding and their ways is even the same place. Like you're just like generically branded. Yeah. So make it very custom to you make it make it have your some marks, your colors. You want to make sure that it's very sophisticated. So like even if you have like a really playful fun brand, you can sophisticate your gift cards a little bit more, but and still have it branded, okay? So even if your gift card lives digitally in your system, I would say especially for the holidays, it is important to have physical ones because again, maybe if someone's buying a gift card for themselves, they won't care as much. They might just be like, you know, I'm just putting it, you know, in my email, they won't care if it's for them and they come to you regularly. But if you want to get in front of new clients where it's like you want to convince your loyal die heart clients to give it to their mother-in-law or their mom or their friend, you want something that they can physically gift someone. So make sure you're doing this and honestly get on it now because you don't want to wait last minute for this. If you haven't done this yet, do it literally two day, like take some time to figure it out and make sure it's done in the next week because we want you prepared. But yeah, you want to make sure, even if it's just this time of year, to have a physical gift card so people can start gifting them. And so, and I just want you guys to think about this, would you rather, if you were getting a gift, would you rather open an email being like, you received a gift card, or would you rather have your friend bring you over something that's beautifully wrapped, hand it to you and you get to open it up? Like be honest with yourself, which one sounds better? Because I promise you presentation does matter, especially during the holidays and it's something you can take off someone's list because if they're like, oh, I want to gift someone something and you can make it look nice, that's, that makes all the difference. It really does. And I think too with presentation, with the actual card itself, a lot of us create things in Canva and then print them through Canva, which is great and easy and like Canva's printing is like I said, easy to use, simple, they ship quickly, blah, blah, blah, but they don't offer foil details or or anything like that. So I'm trying to remember as we're sitting here at least at the name of the company that we we printed something for a client once that had foil details and I can't remember the name of the company that we printed it through online. I can't remember either, but I believe all we're still while we're doing this, but you can print them, even if you design it on Canva, then you can print them with the foil details or like the embossing or like some of the like textured papers and stuff like that. There is an online, I'm going to look at that while we're doing this, but I think that does make a huge difference, but I just said that about Canva because I just printed some invitations myself through Canva and they just don't look as high-end as they would look through a different printing company, even though I absolutely love Canva, but okay. The next thing is we want to talk about the envelope itself. So upgrade the envelope. Okay, don't put your beautiful gift cards inside a cheap white office envelope. Like don't go to, you know, office depot and get a box of 200 white envelopes and stick it in there. You want to use thick envelopes, branded envelopes. Maybe they have an envelope liner, maybe they have a sticker or a seal. And even if you go on Etsy, there's really, really cute seals you can buy. Like ones that look like waxed, like the waxed drip ones that people used to do back in the day. That would be so hard. But you can stick those on there. They have them right on Etsy. I just saw them the other day. You could tie it with ribbon. Oh, you could do like a branded sticker, you could do those, you can even print those through Canva, I think. And then you can handwrite the recipients name too. So some of those just makes it feel a little bit more like intentional and upgraded. And it's really an inexpensive upgrade that can completely change how the gift feels, you know. So someone should be able to hand this over to Christmas or at Christmas without needing to put it inside anything else ideally. You know, maybe they a husband goes out to dinner with his wife and hands it to her or puts it in her stocking or something like that. But like I've gotten gift cards before, like target as an example where it's like the gift card is in that little paper, like little card thing and then it folds into itself with that little flap. Yes. That's not what we're talking about. We're talking about like an actual really nice envelope. And I do want to touch on the thing with the gift cards. They don't need to be a plastic gift card just so you know, like plastic gift cards are cool because it feels like whoa, that's an official gift card. But you can make a, I actually think they feel cheaper than an official like paper one. Yeah. Especially if it's like the thick card stock like we're talking about. Yeah. I mean, even screams more luxuries in my opinion too. Yeah, me too. Especially if it's like a five by seven size. Totally, you know. Yeah. Okay. So number three, give them the option of luxury gift packaging. And maybe for like your higher price point gift cards, maybe that's like a perk of getting a higher one is that you'll do gift packaging. So you could do it like a branded gift bag. You can do tissue paper. You can put ribbon on it. You can put it in a really cool small box like you know, like really fancy jewelry when it comes in those like really pretty boxes. You can just think like that. You could do a cosmetic bag, a holiday bag. Maybe you even have other things that are going with it. So I would suggest totally doing doing different gift card amounts and then walk different packaging. So like maybe for a, if it's a hundred dollar gift card, they're just getting the card and an envelope. Maybe if it's a two hundred and fifty dollar gift card, they're getting the card plus a luxurious gift bag. And maybe if it's five hundred or more, they're getting like full VIP gift packaging where it's like completely put together. I also, which we're going to talk about this next and lead into this, but I also think for higher amounts, adding in other perks is good too, so that you can like throw that into a bag and have everything like wrapped together. So maybe like if you, they have a thousand dollar gift card or more, maybe there's like a little skincare trio or something that you're through that you're putting in a bag to and wrapping it all together. So think of like your gift card amounts as tears. Maybe there's perks and you know what? Maybe it will put, push someone over the edge, which sounds silly. Like maybe in your head, you're like, oh my gosh, no one's going to do just a little bit of extra on a gift card for a different experience. People would shock you. Okay. So you want to make sure that for every single tear that you're doing, maybe something different. And we've noticed that that has helped clients go over the edge with people because I have had clients tell me that people have upgraded to more when they've offered different experiences. So just remember that you can have like a tear system with all of this too. So the companies that you can print the foil details on, we've printed through Vista print before, but then there's also minted. Oh yes, minted. I have heard about it. I feel like Sarah printed something for us through their once when we did like an invitation, but I knew I couldn't remember off the top of my head, but Vista print does it and minted does it too. So anyway. So number four, then the fourth way that you can make these feel even more high end is if you're adding a small physical gift that goes along with it. So like Tulisa was just talking about like a tear system, you can always add in more with each tear of gift card. I wouldn't just allow people to choose gift card amounts either. Like how much do you want to do today? And they're like, Oh, I think I want to do 20 bucks or I think I want to do $230. Like it needs to be this specific tears. And then usually if you can make the bonuses bigger for the tears above, it's gonna push people to buy the bigger tears. Try to get, you know, as much from your reps as you can try to go on Amazon, maybe you could even get like really cute things made on Etsy with like, you know, a little makeup bag with your logo on it or something like that. If you can get them cheap, but for like a $500 gift card, you could do something like lip balm, travel skincare, little eye masks, branded compact mirror, a compact mirror with your logo on it would be so cute. And who doesn't need more of those just thrown in their purse or their car or whatever, a cosmetic bag. Like I said, maybe it's a candle. If you have your own scented candles, those are really, really nice. I know they're like $40 or $50 a piece. So maybe that's not 100% what you want to do, but that could be really nice if you have a candle or it could just be a generic one. It doesn't even have to be yours, but it's kind of nice if it's branded to you. Or maybe you have like the headband and maybe like the wristbands that go along with washing your face. If you have those, some of you guys have like shirts or any kind of branded merch. Just try to think of like what you could put maybe nothing with a $100 gift card. They just get the gift card itself and like a pretty packaging. Then you have, you know, $250, $500. We can talk about this in a little bit, but the more that they purchase, the more that they get as a bonus along with it. Just make sure you're not like shooting yourself in the foot with the cost. But a lot of times if you buy stuff in bulk, you'll be able to, and then you'll have it and you can use it for other things like raffles, giveaways, member bonuses, all that kind of stuff, but like a branded compact mirror. It can't be that much on Etsy, especially if you order quite a few. So this is where the recipient now has something to open and the gift card. So it makes it feel super special. So you know, you're that way you're adding more perceived value without constantly discounting your services. That's what we don't want to do is make it make it feel like cheap or discounted or anything like that. And so adding in like a little gift with purchase, if you will, makes it feel like, because actually now that I'm thinking about it, this is a throwback. But my mom used to be like the biggest estate lottery snob ever. Like you know, estate lottery is it's like the makeup, okay, the makeup counter at Macy's. And I think she used to go to Yonkers, but it's closed here now, but yeah, it was called Yonkers. It's a department store. You've never heard of it. It's store called Yonkers. Yeah, Y-O-N-K-E-R-S-Y-Y-Y-O-N-E-O-N-E-M-L, because I want to know, but it was a really high-end department store. Okay, I'm sorry, hold on, we got a press. Yonkers was a department store. Yeah, Yonkers, that's what it was called. That just like does not even sound like a name to me. That like screams like, like the high-end department store. Yeah, when I were saying it, no, but I guess in my mind, I'm like picturing the signage. No, if you've been to Yonkers, send us an email, because I want to know if you've been to it, or if it was just a West Michigan thing, maybe it was. I've never heard of that in my entire life. That's crazy. It is, but she used, anyway, she used to go to Estee Lauder and she would always do the gift with purchase. So if they were like, if they were like, oh, you just need a foundation, but if you get the bigger size, then you also get the makeup bag and the actual little makeup kit. She bought all of those. I swear, growing up, we had like 75 Estee Lauder makeup bags, or like a little beach bag or whatever. Like we had so much of that crap in our house, because my mom always was a sucker for that, and I think a lot of other people are too. So if you can push them over the edge a little bit to a higher gift card tier, just with the gift with purchase, you know, an extra 30 bucks spent on your end to make the gift with purchase better for them to go from the $250 amount to the $500 amount is worth it. Yeah, totally nice little trade. Okay, so another idea we have is instead of creating just like a gift card, which I'm just like, our tiers are $250, $500, $1000, whatever. You can also create a gift card menu. So it's like creating gift experiences. So instead, if you can just say like, for this price amount, if you pay us this price amount, this is what your mom, friend, mother-in-law, or whatever is going to get. So maybe it's the skin reset, which includes a consultation, a facial, and skincare, like a certain amount of skincare. And maybe that's like your smaller gift card. Maybe it's like the ultimate self-care day. So you have like multiple treatments that they're basically paying ahead of time to give them. Maybe this is one I would say is more for like husbands, because I don't, I can't imagine a lot of people are just going to give us to a random person in their life, but like a year of skin, where they, for a certain amount, you can say like, they're going to get treatments, you know, maybe it's a facial every month, it's microneedling every year, it's a chemical pill, it's a laser treatment, it's talks quarterly, it's like whatever you want to have that be, and they can pre-pay that ahead of time. One that we really liked was like the Med Spa Bestie gift. So this is one that I think people would gift like their best friend. And then again, you're trying to create opportunities for people to come in to see you that you haven't seen before. If you can use Q4 to really, really highlight gifts and like encourage people to give gifts, that is going to get people in your door. Now remember for the Med Spa Bestie gift, you want it to be more entry services that are not intimidating. I think that a lot of people, if they're like, my friends never got in Botox before, they're probably not going to give that to them without talking to them about that, right? That's kind of like a really big gift. That's more of like, hey, let's go do it together. And I'm going to take you and you're going to go for your first time. But these need to be like low, low stress kinds of treatment so these are more like Like, come in for, you know, maybe you have like the salt facial or maybe you have the diamond glow or maybe you have something like that hydrophacial, you have something and then maybe some skincare, like they can come in and pick three skincare products plus they're going to get a facial. So these are like ones that again, it'll get people to come in the door and give you a new client, but it's a fun gift. I would give this. I love how you said three skincare items, like that's so fun. They can pick out the ones that are best for them. And then if you still wanted to tear these, like if you like this route better and you wanted to tear it, you could do one salt facial or you could do a series of three salt facials. Yes, you know what I mean, like you could kind of tear it that way. And I will say with these don't over complicate them though. So like if you're going to like pick a couple of these don't have so many that people get confused. And if you do something like this, make sure like make sure make sure you're doing like a carousel post to advertise this so they can like scroll through the different ones so they understand like the difference between all of the packages. But I just I really feel strongly like if you want to get if you want people to gift these to non clients and needs to be either just a gift card where they can come in and do everything or anything, not everything. Sorry, anything to shoot everything to shoot. Yeah, they give them enough money, but but these kinds of gifts. If you want new people coming in, try to think of that. What is something that you could gift your mother-in-law. Like I would just I would never do that. I'm just being honest. I would never be like, I'm going to gift my mother-in-law Botox. Like that just never seen a rude if somebody doesn't want it. If they don't know or you've never had a conversation, everyone needs it. Yeah, you know, but I did that to my mother-in-law when she's never talked about that with me in her entire life. It would have gone like in it. No, it would not. If anyone knows my mother-in-law, it really wouldn't. But if you do like a facial and like some nice little gift or skincare things, I would do something like that to like anyone for anyone really because that's like something anyone can get. So just be thinking through that mindset. If you want new clients coming through the door because of your gift cards or your gift services, make sure you're thinking from that lens. Like what's truly going to get a brand new person in here, and it would be low pressure for someone to gift. Okay, so just remember that as you're coming up with this. Because another thing too is like people have no concept of how much money stuff is at a med spa. Yeah, like people might be like, oh, $100. That's such a nice gift. The $100 is getting you nothing at a med spa, to be honest. Maybe one skincare item. So like if you if you were to say like I had this facial package, they understand what that is, but they don't understand how many dollars are needed at a med spa. Right. So if you're like, hey, I bought you a facial and three skincare products that you get to go pick out. That's my favorite gift. Yeah, honestly, for real. You buy me that and I'll buy you it. Okay. I want to do it for us. I was in my Minky Kittor blink at you. Mommy is still my favorite gift. I've gotten like in years. Oh, I still use it every day. It's my I have mine right here. Right by my own right. I need another one. Yeah, they're so good. Like I went into my room and then went on my couch. Yeah, yeah, they're the best. They really are the best speaking of which no one's contacted me from Utah. I'm still trying to find someone to go to. So like help us just to out. Who am I supposed to do in Utah? Someone like please give me some recommendations. I've been here for like a couple months now and I still don't know where I'm going. You think that is actually stressful because you have too many options. I have way too many options and I can and guess what though guys. This is a lesson into everything we're talking about. Guess where I'm looking. Social media. Oh, that's all the time. But yeah, I was going to say are you looking to see where the secret lives girl skill. No, by the way, season five came out. I know. Yep, we were like, wait, this is like a we're recording this in September, by the way. So we're in October. That's like old news for them by now. Oh, true, true, true. But, but yeah, no, I don't know where to go. So if anyone knows of a good recommendation around Salt Lake City, please help a girl out. But all of that to say that was a very side note and I'm really sorry about that. But you guys, I am looking on social media. I have moved to a new place and it's the first place I'm looking. So don't discount like how important social media is. No, true. Okay. So our big takeaway is to stop treating gift cards like they're just a payment method and start treating them like they're an actual product. So you need to look at the entire experience, the card, the paper, the envelope, the packaging, the presentation, the offer. The way it's handed to somebody because if somebody's trusting you with $500 for a Christmas gift for their wife, mom, sister, friend, daughter, neighbor, whatever, it should look and feel like they spent 500 bucks. And the bonus is that the person opening it may have never even stepped foot into your meds ball before. So your gift card packaging might actually be their very first experience with your brand. So we want to make it feel like the luxury experience that they're going to get when they come in. And I would say to like another another little thought to is it brought to my mind when it said hand it to them. Like you could even get little gift bags like those tiny little ones. I don't know if any of this might be TMI, but back in the day when I used to go by like one or two underwear is at a time at Victoria's Secret. They gave you like the teeny tiny cute bag. Do you know what I'm talking about? That would be cute. I really like that. But anyway, so if you're doing gift cards for Black Friday, it's October, it's time to like really get your get like in gear for it. Because if you're going to order from VISTA print or minted with the foil details, you got to get that going now. Anyway, we really love gift card sales for Black Friday. It's always been successful for our clients. We hope that you have a successful Black Friday as well and that this gets you excited and motivated. Before we end though, I want to give you just some advice. If you're just going to stick to regular gift cards and you're not going to do like the bundles like we were talking about. This is actually what we recommend the most to people, but what we like to do for Black Friday specifically, just like a little shameless plug, is we like to give extra credit in store. So like if someone buys a $250 gift card, maybe they get an extra $50. So if they buy $250, they're actually getting $300 worth of services. Or $500, maybe it's $600. A thousand, maybe it's 1,200. So that is something that has worked incredibly well for our clients and shameless plug, what we're doing for the membership. And if you're like just want every single thing done for you, for Black Friday, if you're feeling so overwhelmed, we just wrapped up our Black Friday membership content. And we have added so much into the month of November because this is like prime time for you guys where the whole strategy is helping people sell more. And I am so excited for our members because everything is just laid out for them. They'll know what to post every single day, the week of Black Friday, the week before Black Friday, the whole month and the whole month is leading up to it to really get people primed and ready to purchase these. So if you're like so overwhelmed by Black Friday, I really do want to just give our membership a shameless plug because it truly is so good. The content in there for Black Friday is so good. And you will just know exactly what to post exactly what data post everything we have SMS and their emails social, we have reels, we truly have everything you need for a successful Black Friday. So check that out in the link below because it truly could be a game changer for you. And it's literally the strategy we've used, I don't know how many times, like for how many months, because for how many years, like I would say close to 100 times close. And this, it just works for our clients, we've tried many things for Black Friday. And that is just what works the best because whether you're buying for someone else or yourself, you're getting that extra perk that makes it feels so great. And they're going to in their minds, they're like, oh, well, I'll just use this toward my next talk appointment or my next whatever. And so they're excited. And all of our clients that do this past sold thousands and thousands of dollars at Black Friday. So if you want to check out our membership and get access to that content, the link will be in the show notes. And we truly do hope this is the best holiday Black Friday season for your Med Spa. And we're looking forward to chatting next week. [ Music ]