Last year was the 50th anniversary of the scratch card, which is usually used as an instant lottery game. In the most common scenario, the player scratches off three or more areas in the hopes that the numbers or symbols that are revealed will be the same. According to Planet Money on NPR, “Americans spend more on scratch lottery tickets per year than on pizza.”

You may wonder what this has to do with retailing – but one of our newest vendors, Inklings Paperie, has found a way to use this technology on coupons for in-store use. Lindsay Henry founded Inklings in Michigan in 2012. Their sustainably-produced paper goods include confettigrams, cards with pop-up honeycomb inserts, and a variety of cards, games and lunch box notes that incorporate scratch-off stickers applied to cover up a handwritten text.

They now offer eight attractive designs of customer scratch-off cards for their wholesale customers to use “to build loyalty and customer retention.” The set includes 100 stylish cards with a blank spot on which you write a discount or offer using a ballpoint pen. It’s easy to then cover this writing with one of the silver scratch-off stickers. I love the designs, several of which would fit our store’s branding – and also the fact that the cards are less than a nickel each.

We sent out a customer e-mail blast offering a chance for 10% to 50% off on any one item using a free game card. In truth, none of the cards were for just 10%, because we wanted everyone to feel like a winner.  We specified in advance that there would only be one at 50% off – and were delighted when that went to a 10-year-old spending gift money from his grandmother.

The cards were promised to the first 100 in-person customers, and one lesson we learned is that people don’t like this type of offer. They have no idea how many customers we get per day, and they assumed they’d missed out if they didn’t come right away. I think that if we did it again, we would say “every customer, all weekend” and plan on ordering more cards than we thought we’d need. Another alternative would be to encourage customers to write back and ask for us to put one aside for them. After all, the idea is to get customers into the store.

We decided ahead of time that we’d have the customer do the scratch off at the register when they checked out, but that they could continue shopping if they wanted to select an additional item to use the discount on.  After all, the purpose of the “game” was to make the shopping experience fun, and to make everyone playing feel like a winner. We chose a cheerful spring scratch-off card design, and the offer definitely helped brighten a dreary March weekend in Wisconsin.

Happy Retailing,
Carol “Orange” Schroeder