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How to formulate the correct gift certificate wording

Wording a gift certificate (also known as a gift voucher) is hard to get right. There are some required items and some optional items that you want to include in a gift certificate. In addition to these standard elements, you may consider including some legal mentions to impose certain restrictions on the use of your gift certificate.

Mandatory elements

When submitting a gift certificate template, be sure to include the following elements:

• name of your company
• Recipient’s name
• value of the coupon (in dollars or in your local currency) or service provided. This is the most sensitive element of the certificate. In particular, you don’t want the customer to easily change the quantity! So it is better to have it printed instead of writing it manually.
• certificate serial number. A serial number is important for a number of reasons, notably to fight fraud and keep track of gift certificates you have issued. By giving each gift voucher a unique number, you can easily check that it has not been modified when the customer wants to redeem it. For example, you can have a tracking record that associates the serial number with its value, issue date, and customer name.

Some optional items

• buyer’s name: probably a required element for most vouchers!
• personal message: this is a very nice way to personalize a certificate, giving the purchaser the ability to add a personalized message for the recipient.

Legal mentions

• restriction for a certain type of service/product: if you want to offer a certificate for a specific service, mention “valid only for service X” or “to be used in the purchase of X”.
• no monetary value. This will protect you against customers willing to redeem the certificate for cash (people will try to do that!). Mention “no cash value” or “not redeemable for cash” on the certificate.
• non-transferable: If you want the certificate to be redeemed only by the person named on the certificate, mention “non-transferable” on the certificate.
• certificate expiration: this might not be legal in your state/country. Consult your legal regulation or attorney for this. If it’s legal, you may want to include a certificate expiration date to avoid having certificates lying around for years. One year from now is a good default. Mention “expiry date: 2012-03-17″.

Now you know what elements are important to creating good gift certificate wording, so work through a gift certificate template and mix and match the different elements until you’re happy with the result.