Every promotion runs into the same question: how do you give customers a reason to come back without cutting the price of what you sell? A discount answers it by lowering the price for everyone who sees the offer. A gift card campaign answers it differently. You send each customer on a list a gift card of their own, and the prices in your store never change.
Wrapped's gift card campaigns make that a routine job rather than a manual one. This post covers what a campaign is, when one makes sense, and how to run one in Wrapped from start to finish.
What is a gift card campaign?
A gift card campaign emails every card in a gift card batch to its recipient, either as soon as you activate it or at a time you schedule. Each recipient gets a card with its own code and a balance they can spend on any channel you've connected to Wrapped: your POS, your online store or the Wrapped storefront.
Because every card has a unique code, there's no single promo code to leak onto a coupon site. The value goes to the people you chose to send it to.
Why send a gift card instead of a discount?
Discounting means selling a dollar of product for less than a dollar, and it does that for every customer who uses the offer, including the ones who would have paid full price anyway. A promotional gift card leaves your prices alone and puts the value with the customers you want to see again.
| Discount | Gift card campaign | |
|---|---|---|
| Who gets it | Anyone who sees the offer | The recipients in your batch |
| Your prices | Lowered for the promotion | Unchanged |
| Codes | Usually one shared code | A unique code on every card |
| Tracking | How often the code was used | Each card's balance and timeline, plus campaign reporting |
| End date | When the offer ends | The expiry date you give each card |
There's a spend argument too. Across Wrapped merchants, customers spend on average 2–3x the value of the card when they redeem it, so a promotional card tends to bring a full basket with it rather than a customer who only spends the balance.
When should you run a gift card campaign?
Any time you have a list of people and a reason to bring them back. The most common ones:
- Holidays and seasonal moments: thank your best customers ahead of a busy period.
- Customer appreciation: reward regulars without putting your whole range on sale.
- Product launches: give a list of customers a reason to come in and try something new.
- Staff rewards: send cards to your team with the same tools you use for customers.
- Corporate orders: deliver cards a business bought in bulk to each of its recipients.
- Referral and partnership programs: issue cards to people who reached you through a friend or a partner brand.
How does a gift card campaign work in Wrapped?
- Create a gift card batch. Import a CSV with each recipient's name and email address and the balance for their card, plus an expiry date if you want one. Leave the code column blank and Wrapped generates a unique code for each card. The cards sync to your connected sales channels as they're created.
- Mark the batch as promotional. Promotional cards are for promotions rather than sale, and Wrapped counts them separately from the gift cards you sold in your reports.
- Create the campaign and choose the batch. Campaigns are available on the Pro plan and above.
- Design the email. Turn on emailing each recipient their gift card, then design the email and write its subject line.
- Send now or schedule it. Activate the campaign to send straight away, or set a date, time and time zone to send later.
- Wrapped sends each card to its recipient. Cards without a recipient email are skipped, and so are addresses that have unsubscribed or are on your suppression list, cards with emails turned off, and cards with no balance left. Every email sent is logged on that card's timeline, and the card's Apple Wallet and Google Wallet passes are updated.
- Track the results. Campaign reporting shows revenue, orders, gift cards, credit issued and credit redeemed for any date range, and exports to CSV or Excel.
Changed your mind before a scheduled send? Set the campaign back to draft and the scheduled send is cancelled. You can also disable a campaign, and neither affects gift cards already issued. To run a similar campaign again, clone it rather than starting from scratch.
How do you get the most from a campaign?
- Highlight the value: say what the customer is getting and why, without framing it as a discount.
- Keep it exclusive: each code is unique to one card, so the offer reaches the people on your list rather than anyone who finds a shared code.
- Set a redemption window: an expiry date creates urgency. Check the rules where you trade first. In Canada and Australia, for example, the laws that stop gift cards expiring make exceptions for promotional cards the customer didn't pay for, and our gift card expiry laws guide covers the details by country.
- Repeat visits: a promotional card gives customers a reason to return, and every return visit is a chance to earn the next one.
- Make the card easy to find: a card in Apple Wallet or Google Wallet surfaces when the customer is ready to spend it, where an email can get buried.
- Measure it: compare credit redeemed with credit issued in campaign reporting, and see the gift card metrics that matter for what else to watch.
How are campaigns different from automations?
A campaign is a one-off send to a list you choose. Gift card marketing automation runs continuously, issuing a card whenever a customer does something you define, such as spending over a threshold or buying a particular product. Most programs use both: automations for everyday incentives, campaigns for the moments you plan.
Campaign activity also reaches the rest of your stack. Cards sent by a campaign carry the campaign's ID into Klaviyo events and outbound webhooks, including Zapier, so you can follow up in the tools you already use.
See the pricing page for what each plan includes and the feature overview for everything else Wrapped does. For more ideas, read five gift card marketing strategies, how giving away gift cards locally can grow revenue, and our guide to corporate gift cards.
