Last week I was invited by Marketing Lancashire to speak at an event at the iconic Midland Hotel in Morecambe.
As the room was packed with people working in the hospitality sector, I told the story of how we had built our first product, specifically for this industry.
As a creative agency, Hotfoot is best known for designing brand identities, developing websites and creating marketing campaigns. We do this for many different kinds of clients, from giants like Rolls-Royce and the NHS, through to much smaller businesses and start-ups, in this region and beyond.
A few years ago we undertook a strategy session with a pub group to identify ways we could increase their revenue.
We first looked at the obvious things, such as increasing table bookings and room reservations, before focusing on incremental revenue streams. And one that really stood out was gift voucher sales.
This pub group did sell some gift vouchers, over the counter and through a basic PayPal checkout on their website, especially around Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day, and Christmas.
But gift vouchers were never important enough to rise to the top of the list of priorities.
We realised there was an opportunity to build an online platform to make it easy for independent hospitality groups to sell gift voucher packages online.
And so, about five years ago, we launched Regalo (Italian for gift).
Regalo gives hospitality businesses their own branded online shop to display all their gift vouchers and an admin system to easily redeem vouchers, update packages, and track sales.
Customers can choose a package (such as a brewery tour), add an upgrade (such as a case of beers to take home), write a message for the recipient, and choose to have the voucher delivered instantly by email or in the post. We use Stripe as our payment platform for a seamless checkout.
A huge variety of different businesses started to use the platform, offering gift vouchers for everything from Michelin-star meals, weekend getaways and afternoon teas to escape room adventures, spa treatments and clay pigeon shooting.
And then covid hit and everything closed.
So we launched a new website, Vouch.gifts, where people can discover all the gift vouchers Regalo clients are selling in one place.
And we encouraged people to give a gift to their future selves and buy a gift voucher to use when everything re-opens. And that did pretty well. It generated some much needed revenue for our clients, and it made people feel even more excited about going out again.
Vouch lives on today as a place to find a brilliant gift voucher.
Over the years we have learnt how gift vouchers serve as a powerful form of marketing, even more so than word of mouth. When you buy someone a gift voucher you are not just making a recommendation, you are paying for that person to go there.
But gift vouchers must also be promoted. Our best-selling clients promote gift vouchers on their websites, social media, email newsletters and in-venue. As a creative agency we work with many of our clients to achieve this goal.
Gift vouchers can provide an incredible revenue stream. Some £5.6 billion is generated in gift voucher sales in the UK each year, and they are proven to increase loyalty, footfall and sales.
Perhaps most importantly, gift vouchers make a really good gift. In a world full of mass produced stuff from big retailers, people crave experiences. Every gift voucher experience is unique.
