Saving gift card data to basket

Hi,

In my current online store the basket stores the item's ID and size (1,2,3,4,5) in an array, which can then be echoed back out when the customer is on the basket page before checkout. So the array would look something like this - 918s2,967s3 (the 2 and the 3 being the size).

For christmas I now want to add gift cards, for which I need to be able to save the customer's email and personal message in the basket as well. Does anyone have any ideas how I could do this?

Thanks,