Gift-card promotions

The week before Christmas, "spend $200, get $250 of credit" sells more gift cards than any amount of asking nicely. A promotion is how you set that up once rather than doing mental arithmetic at the till twenty times a day.

What a promotion is

A promotion pairs two numbers and gives them a name:

• Value — what the card is worth when it's spent.
• Sale price — what the buyer hands over.

"Holiday Bonus · $250 for $200" is one promotion. Every card sold under it carries both numbers and a link back to the offer.

That link is the reason to use a promotion instead of just charging less. A discount applied by hand is a number nobody can reconstruct in February. A promotion is a thing you can count: how many sold, at what price, and what the credit outstanding against it now is.

You can give it a start and end date, so December's offer stops selling on the 31st without anyone remembering to switch it off.

Promotions live in Settings → Gift card promotions.

New promotion asks for the two numbers, a name, the dates and a line of description.

Or describe the offer in a sentence. Type "Black Friday: $250 card for $200, valid through December" into the box at the top, press Draft, and you get the offer back as it would be created — name, description, both amounts and the dates — with Create promotion and Discard beneath it. Nothing exists until you press Create. If the sentence doesn't resolve into two workable numbers it says so and creates nothing.

Read the amounts before you press Create. This is the one place in the product where a sentence turns into a price, and the price is yours, not the model's. See what the AI does for where else it shows up and what it costs you.

What it costs

The gap between value and sale price is not what the promotion costs you. What it costs you is the gap on the credit that actually gets redeemed, at your cost of delivering the service — and those are two very different numbers.

A $250-for-$200 card gives away $50 of face value. If the recipient spends $180 of it and never comes back, the promotion cost you nothing at all. If they spend all $250 on a Saturday with your busiest stylist, it cost you $50 of your most expensive capacity.

So the question isn't "can I afford 20% off". It's who buys these, and what do they do next:

• A new client walking in with credit is worth more than the discount, every time. They might come back.
• A regular buying their own card at a discount is a straight 20% off everything they were going to buy anyway.

The first is marketing. The second is a price cut you didn't mean to make.

Running one that works

Keep the offer short and dated. Scarcity is doing most of the work, and an offer that's always on is just your normal price.

Aim it at buyers who are giving the card away rather than keeping it. "Treat someone" beats "top up your account" — the first brings a stranger through your door in January, the second discounts a client you already had.

And decide the expiry before you launch, not after. Credit sold at a discount and redeemed three years later is the worst version of this: your costs have moved and their money hasn't.