Merchant: Caribou Coffee
Location: Worldwide
Size: Almost 500 locations
Vendor: CashStar
Bottom Line: Mobile gift cards are helping Caribou Coffee deliver on its goal of providing customization and convenience to customers during the holiday shopping season.
In an effort to enhance Caribou Coffee’s mobile marketing capabilities, and spur a boost in gift card sales during the important holiday shopping season, vice president of marketing Michele Vig launched an eGift card initiative in early November. Now, customers who purchase eGift cards online can send their gifts to friends via email. Recipients can then redeem their gifts by showing their smartphones to a cashier or printing the gift card at home and handing over a paper printout. “If it’s the last minute and [our customers] need to get someone a gift, they can just hop on their computer. They’re able to customize the gift card however they want and send it out,” Vig says. “Customization and convenience were key on our list.”
Caribou’s new mobile gift card program is the result of a partnership with CashStar, a digital gifting vendor that has worked with Crate and Barrel, lululemon, and The Home Depot. “We did evaluate other partners, and as [we] evaluated it, [we] knew that CashStar has had a great performance in launching this smoothly,” Vig says. “Like many of their partners, we had no challenges and we just smoothly implemented it.”
