If you're buying gift cards to support your customer, employee and research programmes, it's clear that you need to budget for the value of these rewards. However, your budget should also include a gift card platform that provides a much leaner process for managing digital rewards than placing orders directly with merchants.

What your budget should be for a gift card platform will depend on many things-and given the current economic uncertainty, cost will probably influence your purchase.

Start by asking about the upfront costs, as different rewards tools have different pricing structures. Knowing exactly what the subscription fees are and how often you will be billed makes budgeting easier. Understand what features come with it and what options are available to customise it to suit you.

There will always be some recipients who never redeem their reward in any type of digital rewards programme. What happens to these unclaimed rewards can have a big impact on your budget. Find out if the gift card platform will refund the value to you so you can use the money for future rewards. If they keep them, as many do, it's harder to fully understand your costs because they depend on redemption rates.

Whatever campaign you're launching, your management will want to see ROI before agreeing to budget for it in the future. That's why it's important to consider the reporting capabilities of a gift card platform. It won't be easy to demonstrate the value of the tool without the right data tracking. For example, you won't know how many recipients actually redeemed their gift cards because many platforms don't allow you to view redemption rates and reward status. As a result, you can only report on the number of rewards sent, which is a big gap in the programme's success measurement.

Calculating the time saved by your team is another way to demonstrate the ROI of purchasing a gift card platform. Gathering email addresses, juggling spreadsheets, buying gift cards directly from each retailer and manually distributing those codes is a massive pain. A digital gift card platform is likely to pay for itself just in time when you add up the hours taken away from other, more business-critical tasks. ip with new customers - without discounts or promotions eating into your profits.