June 9, 2023

Over £1 Million of gifting spend coming from this June and Father's Day!

Over £1 Million of gifting spend coming from this June and Father's Day!

There have always been three gifts for dads: A book, A mug, golf balls. 

Well, step aside conventionality, the fourth present has finally arrived and it's brought to you by Toggle and Zonal: gift cards.

With Toggle and Zonal, hospitality brands can sell digital and physical gift cards from a branded webstore and have them redeemed at till point in order to bring in revenue through gifting. 

Gift Cards have been building up, year on year, gradually becoming part of the Father’s Day brand! In 2019, Toggle saw £30k of hospitality gift cards purchases in the run up to fathers day. In 2020, this number had become £60k.

2021 saw £210k and 2022 was an impressive £340k. 

With that year-on-year growth in mind, we can expect this Father’s day to have somewhere in the region of £600k gifting spend. With all that wonga up for grabs, we wanted to give you the best chance for one of the biggest days of the year!

We’ve worked with our brand new insight & data division, so that we can put the proof into the (sticky toffee) pudding, and serve it up to you! Here is all the things you need to know, to smash Father's Day 2023: 

Father’s Day is in the top 3 spikes of gifting each year

It’s official, the top 3 gifting occasions are: the Christmas period, Mother’s Day and Father’s Day (which sort of makes Santa  an honorary parent). 

Sure, this is fairly obvious …but we wanted to start off with a strong suggestion that you should be treating Mother’s Day and Father’s Day as importantly as you do Christmas (and thanking  your mum and dad as much as you do Santa Claus)

If you don’t have a Father’s Day Branded Gift Card… 

Don’t panic!!! DO NOT PANIC!!!! STOP PANICING!!!  We still saw people coming to buy generic gift cards at Toggle shops. 

However… having a Father’s Day Gift Card will also BOOST your generic gifting sales.

Below, you’ll see a chart below showing Zizzi’s gifting data from the middle of May to the middle of July. 

The blue lines show Zizzi’s ‘generic’, year round gift cards. As you can see, the length of the blue lines roughly stay the same over the two months.

However… The week that Zizzi’s uploaded and promoted their Father’s Day branded gift cards, they made additional sales, which stood on the shoulders of those original, generic gift cards.

Our deduction? Uploading specifically branded cards will only boost your gifting sales 

In the 2 week run up to Father's day (when Zizzi’s ran their promotion), they saw a 27% uplift in gift cards purchased and a 52% increase in sales value uplift. Adding these national day products to your toggle shop doesn’t cannibalise your standard gift card sales, it adds to them. 

Redemptions throughout the year

Only 7% of father’s day cards were actually redeemed on Father’s Day. 

The rest were redeemed throughout the rest of the year, meaning that the impact of a single national-day campaign resulted in year-long conversions. 

(Fun fact: the only day that saw a noticeable redemption spike was exactly one month after Father’s Day. It’s almost as if all the Dad’s in the UK went for a meal together and didn’t invite us.)

What's more, the breakage from all sales in the month leading up to Fathers Day 2021 was 23%. More that 1 in 5 gift cards never made it back out of the bedside draw before eventually expiring, meaning that you can afford to be generous with the added value or discounts on these national day sales, as almost a quarter of them will never be redeemed. 

The gifting knock on effect 

Sure, you’re speaking about your Father’s Day promotions, but you’re actually letting your audiences know that you have gift cards as an option in the first place. 

We know this has a knock on effect thanks to Ego mediterranean. Looking at the data from their previous Father’s Day promotions, Ego have seen the gifting knock on effect first hand. 

The graph below shows how once Ego ran promotions for its Father’s Day campaign a month before, which increased and boosted the longevity of their: generic gift cards, ‘Summer Sale’ gift cards and their In-store gift cards. 

So,

Even though Father's Day is soon, you still have time to build out your campaign. But now the question is ‘What could we do for it?’ 

Luckily, we came equipped. Read last year’s blogs here, for some Toggle store inspiration!

www.usetoggle.com/blog/fathers-day-whats-on-offer

www.usetoggle.com/blog/how-to-smash-fathers-day-on-toggle-2022   

The headline takeaway being that if you take 20 minutes to add a fathers day gift to your toggle shop, and promote it via email and social over the coming week, you will generate much more prepaid revenue in June, than you would have otherwise. Also, you don’t need to be very inventive… food & beer is always better than another pair of socks… Go get em!