Sending one gift card takes about forty seconds. Sending four hundred is a different job entirely, and most of that job happens before and after the moment you press send.
That gap catches people out. A gifting campaign looks like a sending task, so it gets planned like one: pick an amount, pick a brand, go. Then the list turns out to be last quarter’s. Then eleven addresses bounce and nobody can tell you why. Then, three weeks later, finance asks what it cost per person who actually used it, and nobody wrote the number down.
This guide covers the whole shape of a gifting campaign: what you decide before you send, what you check on the day, and what you do with the results. It is written for the person who runs the send, not the person who approves the budget.
TL;DR
A gifting campaign has three phases, and only the middle one looks like sending.
The decisions you cannot undo all happen before you press send: funding, the list, the amount, the redemption window, and the gift type.
Redemption is faster than most people expect. Across 45,162 redeemed Giftronaut rewards, 51.6% were claimed within one day and 95.6% within thirty.
The number that survives the conversation with finance is cost per redeemed gift, and almost nobody calculates it.
Three jobs, and only one of them is sending.
Before you send, you decide who is getting a gift, what they are getting, where they are, and how much of your budget returns if nobody claims it. These are the decisions with consequences, because most of them are fixed the moment the order leaves.
On send day, you check that what you decided is what is actually configured. This sounds trivial. It is the highest-leverage hour in the campaign, because a scheduled order can be cancelled and a sent one cannot.
After you send, you work the exceptions and you produce a number. The exceptions are bounces. The number is what the programme cost per person who used it.
Most teams run the middle phase well and improvise the other two. The improvising is where the cost sits, and the timing data suggests it is common: only 11.6% of Giftronaut orders are scheduled in advance, which means most sends are decided late.
Late decisions are survivable. Late decisions with no checklist are how a send goes out with last quarter’s list on it.
All three phases, as something you can use.
The Gifting Campaign Kit is the working version of this guide: the recipient list template, a tickable send-day checklist, six ready-to-fill messages, and a calculator that turns sent, bounced and redeemed into redemption rate, net cost and cost per redeemed gift.
Because it fails in a way software cannot catch.
Upload validation tells you about duplicates and malformed addresses. It cannot tell you the list itself is out of date, because it has no idea who should be on it. Someone who left in June is still there. Someone who should be there is missing. The file you opened was last quarter’s.
The only control that works for this is a person. Whoever owns the relationship reads the names before you send. That is the whole mechanism, and it takes ten minutes on a list of five hundred.
The second problem is scale. Adding recipients one at a time is fine for ten people and unbearable for five hundred. A programme of any size runs off a spreadsheet, which means the columns have to match what the platform expects before you start filling it in, not after you have typed four hundred rows into the wrong shape.
Three fields decide more than people expect. The amount per recipient, which does not have to be identical for everyone. The currency, where Giftronaut supports 51 across its catalogue. And the language, where a reward email can be translated into any of fifteen.
What to settle before you go further: who owns the list, who signs off that the names are current, and what format it has to arrive in.
It changes what exists, not just what ships.
Country coverage and reward availability are two different things. Giftronaut reaches 225 countries and territories with roughly 4,300 gift card products across 51 currencies. Local gift cards exist in 71 of those countries. In the rest, a recipient is rewarded with a global product such as the Global Visa Reward Card. The country is supported. A local brand is not available there.
Twelve countries are blocked outright under US sanctions: Afghanistan, Cuba, Iran, Iraq, North Korea, Libya, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan, Syria, Venezuela and Yemen. None has any product in the live catalogue, so you cannot select one by mistake.
Then there is the trap that only appears with Branded Cards. Gift cards are issued for a specific country and cannot be redeemed in another, even when the brand name is identical. An Amazon.co.uk card does not work on Amazon.com. If you pick the brand for a list that crosses borders, you have to get every recipient’s country right, and when you get it wrong they cannot swap it.
A Choice Card removes that risk, because the recipient selects their own country and currency at redemption. It is also what most senders use: recipient-choice rewards account for 82% of Giftronaut recipients.
If you want to check a specific market before you commit, the country catalogue lists what is available where.
Two things, and both have deadlines attached.
Funding comes first. Accounts have to be funded before an order can be placed. Giftronaut does not extend credit and does not invoice after the fact, so your funding method sets your earliest possible send date.
A credit card deposit clears almost instantly during US business hours and carries a 3% processing fee. ACH and wire transfers carry no fee, but a wire takes one to two business days and an ACH takes two to five, counted from when your bank sends the payment. That is the entire decision. If you are sending this week and have not funded yet, it has already been made for you.
Then the redemption window. By default a recipient has 180 days to claim, and nothing returns if they do not.
The Refund Option shortens that window and returns part of the unredeemed value to your balance: 50% on a 30 day window, 40% on 60 days, 30% on 90 days. Shorter window, more money back, less time for your recipients.
Two details are easy to miss and expensive to discover late. It has to be selected when you place the order, because it cannot be applied retroactively. And only fully unredeemed rewards qualify, so a partially redeemed reward returns nothing.
Set that against the timing data further down. If 95.6% of claims land within thirty days, a 30 day window costs your recipients less than it sounds like it does. It is still a trade, and it is worth making deliberately rather than by leaving the default alone.
The five things that cannot be changed afterwards.
Once an order is fulfilled it cannot be cancelled, returned, exchanged or refunded. A scheduled order can still be cancelled, as long as it has not sent. So the window for catching mistakes is narrow and it closes hard.
Check that the funding has cleared rather than just been initiated. Check the row count against what you expect. Check the amount by taking one row and multiplying it out against the total. Check the redemption window is the one you chose rather than the default you left alone. Check the gift type is what you decided, and if it is a Branded Card, that it is valid where each recipient actually lives.
None of this is difficult. All of it is skippable when you are in a hurry, which is precisely when it matters. The value of a checklist is not that the items are clever. It is that it works when you are rushing.
The send-day checklist in the Gifting Campaign Kit is tickable, and it remembers what you ticked.
Naming the specific thing.
Everything above is operations. The message is the product, and it is the only part of the send a recipient actually reads.
A note that names what someone did reads differently from one written for anybody. “Thank you for covering the Henderson handover” is a different message from “Thanks for all your hard work,” and it costs exactly the same to send.
Two things matter if your recipients are not all in one country.
Leave the amount out of the message. If the recipient is elsewhere, the value converts automatically when they redeem, and the figure they see will not be the one you typed.
Write for translation. Short sentences, no idioms, and dates spelled out, because 01/15/27 reads as the first of March in most of the world. Giftronaut translates a reward email into any of fifteen languages, but no system rescues a pun.
The experience itself holds up: recipients rate redemption 4.87 out of 5 across 2,906 ratings. The part you control is the sentence at the top of it.
Work out which kind of failure it was, because the platform will not tell you.
You get three statuses on a Giftronaut order: scheduled, sent, and bounced. Sent means the gift email was delivered. Bounced means it came back. What you do not get is a reason, so a mistyped address, a closed mailbox and a corporate filter all look identical from the dashboard.
A sequence makes it faster. Check the address against wherever the list came from, because one mistyped character is the quickest thing to rule out. Check whether the person still works there. Look for several bounces sharing a domain, which points at a filter rather than at your list. Giftronaut reward emails are commonly held by corporate security filters, and the fix is asking the recipient’s IT team to allowlist no-reply@giftronaut.com.
Then resend in one batch rather than one at a time. Resending does not reduce your balance or add a charge, but several resends in a short period can trip spam filters, so batching is both faster and safer.
One detail surprises people: a recipient cannot change the address their reward went to. Only the sender can update it and resend.
Three numbers, and the second one is where most reporting goes wrong.
Bounce rate is bounces divided by everyone you sent to. Ten bounces out of a hundred is 10%.
Redemption rate is redeemed divided by delivered, not divided by everyone you sent to. This matters more than it sounds. A bounced gift never reached a human being, so counting it as unredeemed blames the recipient for a delivery problem and makes your programme look worse than it was. On a send with a 10% bounce rate, the two methods differ by a tenth of your result.
Cost per redeemed gift is the one that travels. Face value, plus any funding fee, minus whatever the Refund Option returned, divided by the number of people who used it. It is the only figure here comparable to any other use of the same money, which is why it belongs in front of whoever approves next quarter.
Write all three down. Next quarter they stop being a guess and start being a baseline.
Everything above, as something you can use.
The Gifting Campaign Kit is the working version of this guide: the recipient list template, a tickable send-day checklist, six ready-to-fill messages, and a calculator that turns sent, bounced and redeemed into redemption rate, net cost and cost per redeemed gift.
Faster than almost anyone plans for.
Across 45,162 redeemed Giftronaut rewards, 37.3% were claimed on the day they were sent and 51.6% within one day. 76.3% were claimed within a week and 95.6% within thirty days. The average was 7.73 days from send to redemption.
Branded Cards move faster than Choice Cards, 6.1 days against 8.0, which makes sense: a Choice Card has one more decision inside it.
Across 45,397 timed redemptions, 68.3% happened between 9am and 6pm Eastern, and the busiest single hour was noon Eastern.
Two things follow. If you are two weeks past send and still waiting on a tail of claims, the tail is not coming, so judge the campaign and move on. And seasonality is severe: December runs 4.4 times the monthly average and carries 37% of a full year’s recipients. For a December send, the thing to protect is not the message, it is the funding timeline.
A gifting campaign is not a sending task with admin attached. It is a small project with three phases, and the two that decide whether it works sit on either side of the send.
Most of what goes wrong is predictable, which is the good news: lists nobody checked, funding that had not cleared, a Branded Card that was not valid where the recipient lived, bounces nobody worked, and a result nobody measured in a form anyone else can use.
Pick the one you are least confident about and fix it before your next send. If it is more than one, the kit is the faster route.
A gifting campaign is one reward send planned as a project, not a task. It has three phases: decisions before you send, checks on send day, follow-up afterwards.
Fund the account first, because funding sets your earliest date. ACH takes two to five business days. A wire takes one to two.
Across 45,162 Giftronaut redemptions, 51.6% were claimed within one day. 95.6% were claimed within thirty days. The average was 7.73 days.
Most senders let recipients choose. Recipient choice accounts for 82% of Giftronaut recipients. Picking the brand means checking it works in each recipient’s country.
By default nothing returns after the 180 day window. With the Refund Option selected at order time, 30% to 50% of unredeemed value returns to your balance.
The platform reports that an email bounced, not why. Check for a mistyped address first. Then check whether several bounces share a domain.
Report bounce rate, redemption rate, and cost per redeemed gift. Measure redemption against delivered, not against everyone you sent to.