Do more with Govalo: 5 features to enhance your store

Whether you’re considering Govalo, recently installed, or a long-time user, chances are you’re already aware of its gift card capabilities. Highly personalized, enhanced customer experience, and feature-rich, ready to delight gift buyers. 


And while that’s already great, there are a lot more features ready to take your store to the next level. 


Those features cover not just more gifting options, but opportunities to target new audiences, new ways to use gift cards across your store, and more.

#1 - Gift Subscriptions 


Gift cards are just the beginning - how about enhancing your store’s ability to offer gift subscriptions? Having a variety of gifting options makes things easier for your customers - if they want something more than a gift card, but can’t choose a product, a gift subscription is the perfect choice.


Setting up a subscription usually requires personalization, from their shipping details, to preferences for the subscription. This can be difficult for a customer buying a gift to decide, and can become frustrating if they need to try and hand over the account to their gift recipient. Luckily, Govalo offers a simple solution by integrating with Recharge or Bold Subscriptions. 



Using this integration, you can offer a gift subscription experience that’s easy for both the customer and their recipient. All the customer has to do is add their recipient’s email address along with a gift note, and purchase the subscription as normal. The recipient will receive an email letting them know they’ve got a gift, along with how many subscription cycles they’ve been gifted. They can then redeem the subscription whenever they like, entering all their own details and completing any onboarding experience you may have to tailor their preferences. 


#2 - Giftable Products


Gifting is often about problem solving - the “problem” is trying to choose the right gift for the right person! Finding that perfect gift takes time and research, especially if the customer is unfamiliar with the brands and products their recipient will like most. So when they find that ideal present, it can feel like a real achievement. But what if they don’t know which size to buy? Or they want to send it directly, but they can’t quite remember the zip code for their recipient? In the first scenario, they may end up buying the wrong size meaning they need to go through the returns and exchange process. Or they may simply give up on the product altogether. 

 

With Govalo, you can keep those customers and make it easy for them to gift the products they’ve discovered. The giftable products feature allows customers to send a product as a gift via email. They select the product, and opt to send it as a gift using their recipient’s email. The recipient can then select their preferred variant, and enter their delivery details. The customer is then given a pre-filled checkout ready to purchase and ship off to their delighted recipient.

 

#3 - Corporate/Bulk Gifting 


It’s incredibly easy to purchase a personalized gift card with Govalo. And it’s just as easy to purchase 100 or even 1000 gift cards all at the same time. Govalo comes with a streamlined, customer friendly corporate/bulk gift card purchasing option. This feature allows merchants to take advantage of the lucrative corporate gifting market
worth over $242 billion, and gift cards are the most popular option with corporate buyers.


Once enabled, customers can easily purchase gift cards in bulk from your storefront. All they have to do is upload a CSV file which has all the details for the gift cards - names, email addresses, gift card values and even a gift note. The gift cards will be added to their cart, neatly sorted by value. They can then complete the checkout process as usual, and Govalo takes care of the rest.


This saves bulk customers time and effort - rather than having to get in touch with your sales team to arrange the gift cards, they can do it all themselves. With this smooth, straightforward experience in mind, your team can then swoop in to develop the relationship for the future. 


#4 - Store Credit


Let’s take a step back from gifting for a second. That’s right - there’s more to Govalo than gifts! Store credit is a highly valuable tool merchants can use to enhance their customer support experience. Rather than installing a whole other app to manage this, however, why not just use Govalo? After all, gift cards and store credit have much the same function in principle. 


Govalo comes with a user-friendly store credit dashboard, giving you a clear and easy way to issue and manage store credit. Having this available opens up a new way to delight customers in their interactions with your support team. If there’s a customer who has an issue with their order, then you can turn things around with a little bit of store credit as an apology. Store credit also acts as an additional option during the returns process. You can even make store credit more inviting to customers such as extra credit when they opt for store credit over a refund, or extending the returns window for store credit. 


#5 - Gift card rewards


Incentives are an ecommerce staple. Whether it’s a 10% off code for new email subscribers, or a freebie with your first order. But have you ever considered using gift cards as an incentive? Govalo’s rewards feature allows merchants to use their gift cards as in-cart rewards, added and managed automatically. Say you want to offer a free $10 gift card on all orders over $100, or maybe the gift card value increases as the cart value does. Govalo will add the correct gift card to the customer’s cart - if they spend more or less, the gift card value is automatically adjusted. 


This opens up another incentive opportunity for your store that’s attractive to customers. Gift cards are an excellent alternative to discounts - they offer something of value to customers, rather than devaluing your products. 


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Getting the most out of every app you install into your Shopify store makes running your store that much easier. By taking advantage of all the features Govalo has to offer, you can improve your gifting experience, customer support, and incentives all at the same time. 

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