Countersignature Restaurant Gift Certificate Made Easy

Countersignature restaurant gift certificate

um everyone i can see you coming in from the waiting room thanks so much for being on time we'll get started in just a couple seconds um okay we'll get going now thank you guys so much for being us being here with us this afternoon my name is anna tauzin i'm the chief revenue and innovation officer for the texas restaurant association and we have a very exciting i promise it's a very exciting webinar on restaurant gift cards today i know sometimes that topic can be a little dry no offense to the panelists that we have today but it can be a little cumbersome sometimes to dig into the nitty-gritty and understand sort of how gift cards work and there's so many different options out there from virtual gift cards to physical gift cards we thought we put together some content for you to sort of dispel any any concerns you might have and of course because we have heartland as a partner we've asked two people from heartland to be with us today uh to go over their gift card program and how that works and then i'm really really excited to have with us lynn sadek as well from landry's he uh is the king and guru of all things restaurant gift card no pressure sir uh but his history is really fantastic and i think he's got a lot of wisdom to impart with us today um so before we jump into questions i thought we'd get started with some introductions and hopi let's start with you awesome thank you so much anna happy to be here today just a quick introduction so my name is hopi white i'm one of the people who work for heartland on our customer engagement team so customer engagement has every everything to do with our value added solutions such as our gift card program rewards programs as well as our newer product analytics so essentially what my role is to work with people like scott who will be introduced here shortly who is a sales rep i kind of get them trained up on all the products make sure they understand how to sell it and i also help i work with merchants and clients as well so anything gift card rewards and analytics i'm your guy um looking forward to speaking with you all today great thanks hopey scott you want to go next sure my name's scott smith i'm a division manager for harlan for the south texas central texas area i've been in the industry for 20 years i spent 17 years at world pay and i've been with heartland for about going on four years actually so coming up on 21 years in the industry that's certainly nothing to shake a stick at scott thank you so much for your for your loyalty and for being with us today and lynn let's uh kick it over to you would you do an intro for us glad to be here today uh so my name is len sadik i am uh director of gift cards for landry's incorporated and uh we are dining hospitality entertainment and i manage our gift card program across all of our 600 or so properties i've been in the gift card industry for 15 or 20 years uh i'm also involved as the president of the incentive marketing association which is a group of incentive solution providers and and incentive industry products so i do that as a volunteer side of the business and uh happy to be here today thanks lynn that's great incentive marketing institute actually has our association institute association association there we go um they have some really great uh education on their website too so i put it in the chat box which is i don't know which side it is for me but it's in there so definitely check take a look there if you have questions while we're going through this webinar be sure to ask them in the q a window or in the chat box i'm also watching the facebook live stream too so if you have questions over there i'll look in all these different places okay so first as sort of an icebreaker question lynn i'm going to start with you uh your favorite gift card to give and remember it doesn't have to be restaurant gift card although you might be partial of course but what is your favorite gift card to give especially during the holiday season of course i would say restaurant first but i'd say during the holiday season probably two different gift cards starbucks seems like everybody loves starbucks and loves to get some coffee and it's kind of a treat and then uh i would say the other one is the amazon gift card because you can it's it's easy to use so those are my two go-to's besides restaurant perfect perfect scott what about you what gift card do you like to give anything golf related be honest but i do like to give a lo a local restaurant here which is hardine del rey and jardine corona the cedar park leander area fun i haven't checked them out yet i'm down in south austin so i'll definitely have to have to go check them out at some point hopefully what about you favorite gift card to give out that's a good question um probably besides restaurant uh probably have to go with like a best buy you know everyone wants to everyone wants the newest device a tv or something or a video game um at least the friends that i have friends and family they really like that best buy gift card so best buy or target i'd say yeah those are those are definitely good ones um those are fantastic i i definitely like to give restaurant gift cards myself um i think right now uh i didn't ask this but lowe's gift cards are also really valuable to me right now i just bought a house so like those gift cards are where it's at um okay so let's jump right into some of the topics today i do have a presentation but really uh you're gonna get most of the information by just listening to what these experts have to say so let's go first and talk about platforms so what kind of gift card platforms is exist out there and how do you evaluate so lynn i'll turn this to you first and then hope you obviously you can talk from your perspective as well thanks so um there's various platforms as far as processors um we use a specific processor but you know there's some many very good ones out there you know i think what we look at is you know the type of fulfillment they can provide you know what's their customer support because we rely on our uh platforms to help us in terms of you know technology and taking care of our guests do they handle online and physical type of of uh priorities uh do they support the pos system is it easy to integrate with them that's very important um and probably another one is just how they do with managing promotions because gift cards now are not just gift cards they're really uh branded currency that does a lot of different things so we always look at you know can these various platforms help us in all of those areas perfect hockey what do you sort of advise people whenever you're talking to them and i know scott you interface with a lot of uh restaurants out there as well so what do you guys think about platforms and how to evaluate the right one absolutely so um it all depends on what they're looking for um i can i can really only speak to one platform for heartland um but i know that there are several out there but again it just depends on what they're looking for if they're the merchants looking for a universal program this is where we always recommend our type of company because they would have their gift cards um their virtual gift card program email marketing which is connected to our awards bracket program it's all connected to each other so it really gives our customers the ability to stay connected with their customers to keep those customers coming back um but again it really does depend on what their what their specific client is looking for as far as how they want to do their pay structure some gift card you know programs have monthly fees and gift card swiping fees uh you know with that type of company we only do one of those so just we we try to keep things simple i'm gonna keep it as easy as possible for our clients at least so it sounds like you both are talking about sort of the same thing integration is really key when it comes to evaluating a really good gift card program yeah you want things to be speaking to each other and be able to track that um i know there are some standalone platforms out there too i'm not quite sure what the advantages are there i'm sure they are there they must exist somewhere but scott do you have any thoughts on how to evaluate for a platform i know like you like hopi would certainly advise going with heartland but any other thoughts yeah um i think the platform will pretty much every processor or major processor out there has their own gift card platform but then you have third party vendors for example value tech that integrates with multiple processors kind of what hopi was saying you know what are you looking for and what products what services do you want out of your gift card program again if you're currently processing with a direct processor they can supply those needs okay so then let's talk about the different types of cards right so there i know that there's virtual cards versus physical cards sometimes especially now whenever you're trying to support local restaurants around the state you may want to buy gift cards for you know i'm in austin but i might want to buy gift cards in dallas and houston and there's often the option to like buy online and a physical card is sent to the recipient but then there's also a virtual gift card so what what is sort of the difference between the virtual gift card and physical other than you know one is physical and one is virtual what are sort of the expenses involved in that and the marketability uh lynn you want to start with that one yeah so we do offer both the the physical and the virtual ecards um ecards continue to grow uh in terms of both acceptance and use and uh in the current environment where people looking for access to a gift card the easiest way maybe not even having to leave their home to purchase your gift card uh we're seeing an increase in each gift card so it's really accelerated um since the the hulkova thing where people can still send their e-card across the country um but you know physical cards are still popular um we're seeing um in in our world here physical cards are still a pretty strong percentage um because if somebody's looking for gifting um a lot of times they do want that physical card that they can either present to somebody or send to them and you can have a nice holder with it which we do and um so there's some some uh benefits to both um ecards are instant so the closer we're going to get to holiday now e-cards are just going to climb dramatically so we're going to see every day now eat cards climb faster than physical so you want to be you know looking at taking care of both of those options and frankly e-cards have come a long way the the third party we use we customize our e-card so if you want to put your business logo on there if you want to put a message on there we do that as well so even e-cards now become kind of more personalized than they have been in the past um kind of a curious question for you on this len too so e-cards i know that um okay so i actually just happen to have a pile of gift cards in my death store right here um so it's very easy for me to go back and find the ones that i'm looking for right but for e-cards it's kind of difficult because you don't really have like an electronic wallet for the consumer right so how do they keep track of their e-gift cards are there any ideas there yeah actually the the e-cards are actually for for us server taking care of our our guests yeah cards are easy easier for us to track than the physical cards because with an e-card we always have a name and an email and we will have people call that bought their e-card two years ago and they can't find it and we can go into the system pull up that e-card by their name or email we send it to them that's amazing so actually e-cards have become for us in the you know the restaurant business we like ecards better because we can help people and know what their purchase has been take care of a lost card or or they're not sure you know how much the balance is on there we can look all that up that's that's really fantastic great so what um you forgive me if you said this i don't think you told me the breakdown it did you describe the breakdown between physical card and ecard of what where you guys are at right now yeah we're about 25 e-card in terms of total volume and 75 physical but when i give you that percentage i'm not just talking about purchases online i'm talking about cards bought in a third-party gift card malls it's all of the the larger bulk cards that we sell to businesses so that's where the mix ends up but if you look at probably just you know the the one the consumer that's buying one card it's probably more now 60 plastic 40 card in our world interesting interesting okay um and we did have a question come in for you lynn uh that i wanted to ask we're backtracking a little bit but which platform does landry use for their gift cards in terms of our processor mm-hmm uh phi sir is our processor okay okay so much love for heartland promise no problem thanks scott um okay great so what about i hope you from your perspective whenever you're working on customer success and they're talking to you about physical gift card versus electronic gift card what kind of features do you talk about with them so that they know kind of the the pros and cons absolutely so just kind of piggybacking off what lynn mentioned already very similar programs in regards to what they can do um but i'm what in regards to what's happening right now this is something that's been a huge selling point for virtual gift is kovit kobe 19. we're living in a very unpredictable time and having a virtual gift card program can really set restaurants apart from other merchants who don't because by having that virtual gift for a program now you're allowing customers to go and still purchase a card with the physical card you actually have to go in and purchase that card but if they could do it online we put it on their website allows their customers to purchase that virtual card now they can use that virtual car to make a purchase online so now they're completely having to avoid going into the location um by still being able to buy and make purchases at that location so just being able to keep that restaurant afloat so that's what we've seen a huge increase of our existing gift card merchants who've never really had a virtual kit program so those have all increased we have a lot of those existing clients reaching out for virtual guitar programs strictly for that reason yeah that makes sense that makes sense okay so let's get into some of the terms and definitions on this because i know for me i learned a lot whenever we did a pre-call a couple weeks ago to understand this so scott i hope you're ready with these answers um he's like what um tell me a little bit about a promotional reward gift card versus a true gift card uh scott do you want to take that or you want linda take that you know i think i'll let lynn take that because it's more of a legal question and i don't want to pretend that i know the law no that's totally fair so promotional reward gift card versus a true gift card line yeah sure i'll be glad to take that so um we all kind of know what a gift card is um there's anything that's called a gift card that somebody purchases um has to be redeemed as a gift card like basically like cash you can't um you can't have a expiration date on it you can't have restrictions like one time use so um we mark it as when when people you know we talk to people buying the gift card we we basically say it's just like cash um the promotional cards which have a great place and many of us in the restaurant do promotions with you know buy a gift card get a promotional card and we always want to be careful to differentiate be real clear with our terms and conditions for the guests so that they know they're really two different things a promotional card we may not you know accept those until for instance we're running a promotion now and i know probably a lot of folks on here as well and you know with a promotion card you can say that you get it now for buying a gift card but you can't use it till january 1 in our case again that's very similar to i know a lot of people out there that run that so it kind of gives you two opportunities a gift card can be gifted obviously you wouldn't want to gift a promotional card you don't want to give it to somebody and they find out they can only use it with a minimum purchase so i would just encourage all of us to be very clear that you know the gift card is is kind of the the giftable cash easy to use card and the promotional card is really what it is it's a promotion that's an added value when you buy your gift card that seems pretty logical thank you um we i know we're going to get into some more questions around marketing and how to talk about those promotions in a little bit but we wanted to go through a few more of the questions around like uh rules and regulations around gift cards so hoping maybe you can help us out with this one on the kinds of fees involved um you mentioned before like there might be some swipe fees related to gift cards too like what what kind of fees can people expect to see when they're rolling out a gift card program absolutely so depending on uh the process that they go with it could just be they're going to get charged maybe a certain percentage per swipe um that's usually a standard fee and a monthly fee so usually they're just paying you know whatever there's 50 a month or something like that plus they're swiping fees um so when and the cost of their cards so yeah so you initially the cost of the cards depending on the quantity they want to buy um the cost per swipe and then their monthly fee but when it comes to heartland all we have is a simple monthly fee plus the cost of their cards to keep it simple what's um so that's usually the only fees associated program what how much do the cards cost typically typically an initial investment you can get as little as a hundred cards and on average we can say they're a dollar a card um that would be a fair estimate between all the different platforms um as you go up in the volume those card prices can get down to about 30 cents a card so if you needed 10 000 cards it may even be less than 30 cents um so initial cost is going to be somewhere between a 30 cents and a dollar per cart that's not that's not bad and then who designs the gift cards how does that work because i mean there's some pretty colorful ones that i have in my wallet down here uh who does that design work we have some questions so there's a couple of options depending oh go ahead scott no you go ahead yeah i'm just gonna say it depends on um you know who the processor is again but when it comes to how heartland does it we have a standard card option so we would provide the with the client with the with the with the catalog where they would choose their font background color and it would put their business name on that card but they have something specific like some artwork or a logo that they want to put on the card as long as they provide us with the original image we can take care of that for them so we can do custom card artwork it's so it's usually the processor that does it uh that takes care of that artwork for them okay good to know i they just have to provide the artwork yeah that makes sense this is all very this is all really simple it is but it's stuff that you don't really think about right like there's but there's some pretty ugly gift cards pretty pretty boring so scott let me let me ask you this question okay what is breakage i hear breakage all the time whenever we talk about gift cards what what does that mean and i'm gonna preface this again by saying i'm not a lawyer but breakage is typically the amount or the value that never gets redeemed so if you sell 10 000 worth of gift cards the national average is somewhere between five percent and ten percent of that will actually never come back into your store you know when you when you get into a gift card program you your whole intent is to increase foot traffic into your door but the breakage is really just if you want to talk about return on investment and i'll just give you an example custom cards the minimum order is 500. let's just say they're a dollar a card so that's 500 if you bought 500 cards and you could load them up to 500 you've got 250 000 of potential income into your business ten percent of that may never get used so that's twenty five thousand dollars that you've set aside into an interest bearing account that will never get used so breakage in the short term is the is the amount of cards that never get redeemed okay so breakage is a good thing so yeah i would say i would say it is because if you're worried about the cost of your program the breakage is going to pay for it oh that's interesting okay so when you're talking to maybe a potential platform you can ask you know you know what is it what does the breakage look like typically and what happens like i mean we talked before about where do the where does the money from the sell of gift cards go and uh lynn maybe scott i know you had an opinion on what what should happen with those funds and lynn maybe you can talk a little bit about what landry's does too yeah sure so um just to go back to breaking from it yeah perspective um and this has been kind of um i've always looked at this way in my various roles in gift cards um as scots at breakage is it kind of you know helps cover some of the costs and so forth but we always create programs to try to get as much redeemed as possible because as as was also mentioned we want to get people you know into dining with us and experience you know what we have and come back so it's a great item for getting new customers so we don't encourage programs to generate breaks in other words at least from from my perspective uh but it is a fact it is there is breakage there always will be and it does you know help a little bit on the on the program um your other question was go back well we have another question from shane actually in the chat asking if ten percent breakage is realistic do you see that typically or is it i mean scott said it's anywhere from five to ten percent that's what we find i'm right in that ballpark with what scott said as well and i've even heard you know across kind of across the industry that's a good number to that i've heard and and that we look at so let me ask you this question because it's kind of a two-parter lin so if i'll say it again is when the okay when people when guests purchase gift cards where should that money go and sit in the restaurant's accounting and then do gift cards traditional gift cards don't expire right so how long does it sit in that account forever so i can answer the first part second part i'm going to kind of disclaim i'm not an expert but it goes into a liability account because those are outstanding dollars out there basically owed to the consumers so you want to have those money set aside because at some point when they come back to claim them you want to have enough funds so that you uh accounted for that and you don't have a hit that you didn't plan on so depending on your sales you have all of those dollars put aside in the liability account because basically again it is owed to those individuals um i you know there's various regulations on in terms of when you can claim those unused funds as income i i'm not an expert on that it is a number of years i will say that you can't claim it all in one year but there are some regular accounting regulations that require you to only take a certain percentage per year as income for that breakage okay that makes sense so when in doubt call a lawyer that's that's usually for your accountant yeah are your accountants there's just yeah i usually from our team i usually call kelsey i'm like is this right i don't know um okay so let's skip down i want to get to marketing at the end because that's the most fun i'm biased but i want to talk a little bit about some numbers in general so what is the magic number to budget for gift card sales um obviously if you're a smaller restaurant it's a little different but lynn from your perspective what do you typically advise the company to budget in terms of how much money they'll be bringing in for gift card sales probably somewhere in the range of five to ten percent of your total sales okay from gift cards that's a that's a good kind of starting goal that i've always used okay okay and whoopi and scott whenever you guys talk to to customers is it the same is that about what you anticipate yeah yeah anywhere between one say five to five starting at budget up to fifteen percent usually is what we say okay okay and then go developed you know that will become a higher percentage you know when you first start out if you know people don't know you as well they don't know your brand but as the the brand gets to be better known and whether you know an individual marketplace or multiple marketplaces then that's going to grow as a percentage of your sales sure sure but that also takes some investment as well um and we'll talk a little bit about that in a second like how those kind of work um but remind remind us and remind the people on the the webinar how much typically gets redeemed whenever you an average year like how much of that really comes in um i think we're back to that that number where we're saying 90 to 95 of that is going to come in okay great um and then okay so one thing i did want to talk about and then we'll jump into sort of marketing and sales is and this was sort of a one of the moral quandary questions that i asked you guys last time we were on the phone is obviously some restaurants are not doing well um they're in trouble we hope that we will see a relief bill passed by the congress soon fingers crossed i know we're all filling out those emails to our congressmen and women to get them to act but there is a chance that some restaurants know that where they sit today they may not be around uh three six months from now um is it morally okay for them to sell gift cards right now knowing that they may not be around this this is a question i know when you're giving me that face but like this is a question that doesn't really have a good answer um but hopefully since you weren't on the call before you get to take it okay ah yeah that's a that's a tough one to answer that's a really tough one to answer i would say yes i think i would say it's very necessary and i will go back to that virtual gif that virtual gift example i gave earlier you know as long as a merchant has that ability for customers to go online and purchase that virtual gift card they the funds are there and they can take they can use it for that reason hey customers are valued customers please purchase a gift card so this is going to keep us afloat during these hard times um so if you if ever if we have this many people purchase a virtual gift card and this many months we should be good to go so if they have that that type of messaging and they have loyal customers um i would say yes but again it's that that's a tough one to answer depends on the business it is a tough one lynn i know we talked for a while about this one last time we were on the call did you have any additional thoughts you wanted to share on that one it is a tough one um i would say just be i think it's still okay to sell gift cards but um and i think we talked about this in that you don't want to start giving them away selling them at 50 off because that's not going to really help anyone and um you're just going to sell a lot of gift cards that people may not be able to redeem so my suggestion would be you know sell them as close to full price or as full price as possible um have some idea of how many dollars you're selling so that you're um as hopi said so that you're looking at you know is it six months worth not trying to you know in 30 days sell the next two years worth of gift cards so i think you want to continue to sell gift cards but just maybe be a little bit more um calculated um as far as how much you promoted you pushed it based on kind of your current circumstance yeah yeah it's tough to to bring that question we've had yeah i'm just going to say we've had several of our clients who who just had basic gift card programs signed up for virtual gift for that example that i gave you um and this is i want to say right when covid started you know back in i want to say march april so a lot of those existing clients who turned on their virtual gift card program and promoted that to their existing customers to let them know hey we may close down unless you got it must be if we sell a good amount of gift cards um and a lot of those businesses are still around strictly because of their gift card program yeah yeah okay so let's talk about how to get those gift cards sold right i think this is something that lynn has some great experience in so i'd love for him to talk us through some of the um the marketing examples that he sent over before so then you want to talk us through yeah so um throughout the year we try to take advantage of any gift giving opportunities time periods when people are looking for gifts um so what you see here is um you know we did a treat friends and family wherever they are because we started to see during covet that you know mom and dad are sending a gift card you know from the east coast to the west coast because you know they can't see them but they still want their family to be able to you know dine out or get take out so uh we kind of did that messaging to kind of promote what was relevant during that time period um you know grandparents day i talked about customized gift cards right who doesn't want their um grandparents and and great picture the grandparents and the you know the grandchild on the card so we oh wait so that's that's actually like someone uploaded the photo and that's their own i thought it was like a generic one i didn't realize that that's really cool that is actually something that we market that is a custom gift card you can do it with one gift card um and our third party makes that available to us um and then you get into kind of the holiday time frame where we talked about your gift card with your promotional card and again you know we're very clear there that it's a gift card and it's a reward card that has some restrictions on it um but we're um we have usually plan out you know three to six months out um kind of uh one year plan as well but kind of as things as we kind of see what the marketplace does obviously especially during these past you know six to 12 months we've kind of you know shifted things to be relevant to you know what our our guests are experiencing and um what they can relate to so hobie and scott as you guys talk to restaurant customers that are out there now how are you helping them position themselves to talk about gift cards during the holidays and after the new year do you have some ideas you might be able to share you know i'll just say that i don't to be honest i don't like the word gift card i like the the terminology electronic marketing card because when you when you call it a gift card you almost put it into a box a gift box for example where a program like this is really derived and should be driven to push people into your business throughout the year and not just christmas or uh valentine's day um but yeah so we talked to him about you know how can you how can we bring more people through your doors through this program so that's what we talk about when we're talking to customers hoping anything to add in there yeah i'm just letting or asking the simple questions of like hey how are you currently promoting your business without breaking the bank um like how like what do you what type of conversations are you having with your customers when they come in just having them i'm all i'm a pretty bold person when i'm talking to my customers i'm always just like hey this is what you need to do they ask me the question talk to your customers ask them what they're getting for their family for christmas suggest the gift card like sometimes it takes having no having those conversations just being open with your customers um so i'd say just kind of adding off of what scott just said it's just kind of being bold and be able to communicate with your customers yeah now that's really helpful and um i i appreciate your terminology there scott on the electronic marketing card but i guarantee you that's not what people are calling them whenever we give them to them they see it as a good part i understand like as like that wonky response like it absolutely is you know i mean i have my pile of electronic marketing cards next to me um and it reminds me that i need to go and you know spend the the gift card dollars and and and then some of course at these restaurants and local retailers um but in terms of gift card like i think i think people do recognize that terminology and they they want to be able to give although it is interesting i sent this article to you guys earlier today because i caught it in restaurant business that gift card sales are actually down right now um and that's really unfortunate of course we want people to be able to go out and purchase gift cards uh from local restaurants specifically and give them to their family this holiday season so lynn you have a promo here about um you know getting a free reward card too so is that something that can encourage more gift card purchasing from consumers as well can you talk a little bit about that yeah absolutely and our sales are doing quite well um fortune a little better than that article that you provided us so um i think it's because we're you know constantly messaging it we're you know we're out there talking about um gift cards all the different ways that you can get them and just a tag and a little bit of what scott said something i've heard kind of it's a little bit more of an internal concept but um kind of in our in our gift card world that i live in a branded currency has been something that's that's been talked about a lot as far as relative to gift cards because when you think of it you are getting you know out there you know a uh we call a little billboard right that people have to come back to your uh restaurant to redeem so um i kind of like that terminology um and we've been like i said you know promoting the free reward cards we started earlier this year so we would always start november uh this year we started hearing that you know not only in the restaurant world but throughout retail that people are going to stretch out their shopping so this year we started um our promotions in october instead of november and that really did help us um and it's continuing it's continuing right on through so um we're seeing uh good results uh and the nice thing about this reward card promotion is you're getting a sale now and then you're bringing people back after the first city year so you're getting you know at least two visits out of that purchase so uh and we're all looking for sales beginning you know starting in january so uh it kind of brings back people to for trial and um the other thing is we kind of message it as kind of a give and get so in our case the physical card gets sent to the recipient or to the person buying it but the reward card is always going to get sent to the person who bought that card so now you know i may give you a gift card and guess what i'm also going to come in because i've got a reward card so now i've got two families coming in with the same promotion is it rude to give is is it rude to keep the gift card for yourself and give away the reward card that's sort of like a miss manners thing like i said like i think it's still giving people the same reward right or something a little bit different but um i don't know i don't promote gifting the reward card but that's what i'm saying it's like and the person really who receives it still gets whatever they thought they were getting right and uh the person who bought the card gets something as well so i definitely have uh i definitely have one relative in my family who likes to give me the reward cards so instead of the gift card which you know i guess it's the thought that counts but but maybe not um so typically whenever people come in to redeem gift cards or reward cards how much more do they tend to spend whenever they they come into the store do they just spend right at that forty dollar gift card level or did they go above that what does that typically look like for you lynn and then uh scott we're seeing um [Music] anywhere from 30 to 60 that they spend above the value of the gift card uh obviously depends on what denomination of gift card that they purchase on a smaller gift card you're gonna you know small denomination gift card you're gonna get a higher lift again depending on what your you know average ticket is but uh it's it definitely is higher than the value of the gift card hardly anybody just spends a gift card amount that's probably any of us going to attest to when we go out with a gift card because it kind of feels like some found money um but it's in that range of like 30 to 70 percent that's great scott does that track with what you guys have seen too yeah and i'm just going to use national averages again um the national average is 46 percent so it falls right in line with landry's and what lynn is saying 30 to 70. so if they got a 100 gift card they're gonna you can expect that they'll spend 146 dollars in your location that's pretty good it's pretty good um okay so i have a great question from someone on the q a window here on maximizing your gift card sales at off-site retailers like the malls that we were talking about land grocery stores lows they have these great big you know gift card centers basically to me they always sort of seem like the airport gift shop of gift giving where you're just running in real quick and you uh you know you think of someone that you maybe didn't get a gift for and you just buy it there how does that work how do people get their cards in there and then what is the expense on that so uh that third party gift card mall is a um a substantial piece of the business but um you have to be very careful with it it's probably one of the most expensive distribution channels um mainly because you're gonna pay permission to the to the third party that manages those programs and um in most cases there's you know it is two or three that are income and blackhawk have probably 90 percent of that business but you're going to pay a commission to have your card placed in that third party and they tend to go through a lot of physical cards so your card cost is fairly substantial so i'm always making sure that my sales are in line with what my costs for cards are because they're a major user of plastic and you're you're gonna because you if you're in a particular grocer let's say you need to have so many on every pay right at least a minimum amount and they typically have lots of doors that you're going to be in so if you start multiplying it you have to be very careful how many cards you are going to be asked to produce so so we we we're very careful with that um and we don't go in every channel some channels are not a fit for us um i'll give you just one example um convenience stores if there's you know literally thousands of those and we just don't participate there because it's not our guest and it's not where people spend time to look for our type of gift and they can be very again very expensive because you've got a lot of locations with a lot of cards so my advice is be selective where you go um be careful your your investment in in cards um and make sure that it's a it's a good fit for your brand you know you want to be um i don't want you know you don't want to be in the low end retail or a mall if you're a higher end restaurant it's just not a great fit so we kind of look at all of those pieces that's fair it seems it seems really expensive to me now that you've run down sort of all the costs and thinking about the thousands of plastic cards that probably run through those retail outlets that's that that is really expensive especially for some local restaurants you know that that might be too much for them you know to to deal with they tend to lock around the holidays anna because uh as you mentioned they're kind of a convenience item oh i forgot to get a gift for somebody i'm not in the restaurant um and i'm gonna shop maybe from three or four choices and so you wanna you know you don't wanna not be in all of them but again just um the best fits sure sure that makes sense um so one thing i did want to share with everyone while while i have you as a captive audience is uh we've actually partnered with the office of the governor uh economic development tourism office to list a bunch of restaurant gift cards available on our website so i'm sharing the site with you here and then i also have it in the chat window i think i hit go nope here we go so you guys can go look at that page too um it's just tons of restaurant gift cards you know a lot of these frankly are local independent restaurants sometimes it's hard to remember like what's in the area that i might want to buy a gift for for someone no offense to landry's at all definitely want to support them but also support your local independence too so if you're looking to purchase a gift card for the holidays i'd recommend going to this page and looking through and seeing some great independent options um if you are a restaurant operator that wants to get i see your question rachel added to that list i think it's down at the bottom no no you know what i'm just going to give you the email of the person on my team that is handling this project uh alexandra email her and she will get you added so all we need is your location the name of your restaurant and the link to go and buy the gift card that's the most important part really oh thank you shane i didn't read it oh it says it right there okay uh clearly i'm reading too quickly uh but it's in there so you can go and submit uh your restaurant gift card information here in fact here's the form i'm gonna paste that link right there and then we'll get that added as quickly as possible too because we definitely want to support some of the great local independent restaurants around the state and i would recommend all three of you go and do that as well okay so one other question that i wanted to bring up that came up in the chat earlier today is on how to handle um fraud when it comes to gift cards so what are some examples perhaps that we've seen of gift card fraud and how do you guys deal with it um scott or hopi do you get oh hope he just disappeared he didn't want to talk about it at all um scott do you want to talk a little bit about gift card fraud and how to avoid it you know i think that's one of the reasons that electronic gift cards came into play is because most people had paper certificates and it was to avoid that fraud i guess i need more question on when they're talking fraud is it like duplicating a card or um yeah i turned it back on tina um if you want to add a little more um color to your question feel free to do so um and we can we can expand on that but in the meantime lynn do you have some thoughts on gift card fraud and what have you experienced to avoid that yeah one of the things kind of the base one of the basics is we always um try to educate our restaurants to make sure that they check the balance on the gift card it sounds very basic but you will have you know guests come in as they are uh determined fraudsters they may say hey this gift card has a hundred dollars on it and it might be just a piece of plastic that's never been activated so i mean that's the simplest form and so we always say you can't come you know if you can't verify the balance online don't accept the card and then we kind of can help out from the office here because we can look up history and that kind of thing so we ask that they send the guests to us to help them resolve whatever that issue is well i mean you mentioned earlier sort of the gift card malls and especially you know in convenience stores and things like that it's so easy for people to pick up the card obviously there's no money loaded onto it unless you until you check out but it'd be very easy for someone to just present a blank card that's never been activated and say no it definitely has a hundred dollars on it or 200 and and then you get into that conflict right with whomever is with you and it may not even be someone who stole the card it could be they were given it as a gift and they were told that there were 200 on it that's definitely awkward i mean how how would you recommend a restaurant or handle something like that um you know everybody's in a little different situation in terms of what resources they have but um mainly if you can just get back to you know asking questions about where it was purchased you know do you have a receipt you know we never try to get confrontational about it um but you're basically you're trying to to help them because in some cases it is as you mentioned it may be somebody that thought they gave them a card that had value on it and they picked the wrong one out of their drawer when they were giving it we get that all the time so we just you know try to to help to um just get to wherever you can check the history and balance on that card and that typically will help the guests as well in a lot of cases once you point that out they may say oh yeah that's right there was two i bought that day or something like that sure sure that's great um or someone in their family gifted them the reward card that does expire awesome well i don't see any other questions coming in i'll give you guys a couple more seconds if you want to ask a question in the chat window or the q a window feel free to do so i'm just going to look over my notes here really quickly um [Music] i think everything you guys have have shared with our audience has been really really helpful i really appreciate your time and oh hey hopi you're back um nice to you uh this has been very no worries this has been very educational for me certainly um i know for a lot of people that stuck with us on the webinar as well and for the folks that joined us on facebook i can see them that they're they're all watching now too so thank you guys so much we will post this recording and make it available and all of these gentlemen have been very responsive to email questions so i hope you guys know that i'm going to be giving out your contact information um in case these people these lovely people have questions i really appreciate it you all have a wonderful holiday uh and thanks again for your time today my buddy thank you thank you