Whether launched to delight and reward existing customers and staff or attract new business, corporate gifting campaigns are curated and launched to cause positive disruption in the way businesses communicate with their clients, prospects and employees.
Considering the velocity at which new vendors and service providers emerge across all verticals, the monopolistic business narrative continues to be rewritten, resulting in the modern buyer having numerous vendor options. The consequence? Increased demand for creative marketing, onboarding methods, and personalized customer interaction tactics.
Corporate gifting addresses this need, and functions as a touchpoint between your business and its customers, staff, and associates – creating meaningful connections and motivating actions that result in increased customer acquisition, retention, and overall brand preference.
Before incorporating gifting as part of your business strategy, there are some things that you need to do. Businesses need to analyze their immediate objectives before identifying corporate gifting platforms with tools that address these objectives and tick all the right boxes. But, what are these boxes? How do you know which corporate gifting platform is right for you? This blog highlights a few factors to consider when choosing your corporate gifting partner. Read on for some wisdom.
Corporate Gifting Platforms Are Your Acquisition and Retention Partners
Before delving into the checklist, it’s important to understand that corporate gifting platforms aren’t just gifting enablement tools, they are your partners and oversee the entire gifting process: from item sourcing and preparation to delivery, and finally reporting. The core purpose of a platform is to facilitate the gifting process and enable KPI-backed campaigns. While the budget determination and objective stipulations ball bounces on your side of the court, the remaining line items, including the shipping and customs handling, as well as warehousing where voluminous SWAG merchandise is concerned, lies with your corporate gifting partner.
In a nutshell, corporate gifting partners handle the admin-heavy work, so that you can focus on the ROI-raising strategy. An essential kind of partnership if you ask us!
Consider Your Gifting Budget
Despite the low prices associated with membership sign-ups, it’s vital to allocate a budget for your corporate gifting, particularly because such campaigns are seldom once-off. This part of the process is as important as your marketing efforts and should be accompanied by prestige planning. Once budgets are analyzed and approved internally, it’s easier to narrow your potential partner list down using costs as an indicator. With plans starting as little as $1500 per year, Giftsenda will suit almost every business’ budgetary requirements.
Be Mindful of The Brand’s Reputation and Experience
The perfect corporate gifting partner shouldn’t be vetted on by their ability to forward gift packages, because courier companies can do that. Instead, the brand’s industry experience and reputation ought to be placed on a scale to determine how seamless your direct mail gifting experience will be. Giftsenda is headed by a team with over 20 years of international gifting experience. When partnering with Giftsenda, you can rest assured that all aspects of your campaigns, including cultural constraints, regional gifting etiquette, local language-based messaging, and shipping will be taken care of.
Verify That The Marketplace Covers All Your Gifting Bases
Business relationships have very unique nuances and require different levels of nurturing to thrive and produce two-way benefits. For this reason, each client, prospect, and staff member’s gift offer needs to reflect each one’s individuality and preferences. With this said, it’s crucial to consider the gift item varieties and inclusivity of your potential corporate gifting partner’s marketplace. This way, you cover all your bases and can offer different kinds of experiences.
The Giftsenda marketplace was designed to cater to every possible gifting need and to further facilitate our client’s gifting journeys, we’ve created gift collections that are based on seasons, functionality, holidays, regions, use cases, and Dollar value. With this, all the sender has to do is choose a collection and the recipient will choose their own gift or experience.
Delivery Time and Customs Details
Thanks to consistent improvements in technology, businesses that initially only serviced regions within their radius are now able to stretch their reach and acquire clients from around the globe. Additionally, with the introduction of remote work that allows businesses to hire experts from around the world, international affiliation is enforced. For this reason, it’s essential to choose a corporate gifting partner with truly international reach. One that’s able to cut out the middle man (import duties, cross-regional shipping fees…) and make timely and efficient deliveries.
Thanks to our 200+ country reach, we locally source gift items in your recipients’ regions, resulting in the elimination of import and export duties. Shipment is quick and accurate.
Choose a Corporate Gifting Platform With An Integrated And Easy-To-Use interface
The final aspect to analyze when choosing a corporate gifting partner is how integrated the platform is with your CRMs and mailing platforms. That is, can you easily launch your campaigns using a platform native processes? Or would you require a manual import of client and prospect contacts? Choose a platform that allows seamless contact information integration, and offers a bird’s eye view of all campaigns.
The Giftsenda platform integrates CRMs such as SalesForce and Hubspot, and has a Gmail add-on that allows you to send gift invites directly from your Gmail interface. We promote a simple yet effective click-and-send process that helps you save your most important resource, time. Additionally, you can view in-depth reports on the performance and progress of each gift that is sent.
Ready to get started with corporate gifting on a global scale? Book a 30-minute demo with one of our Gift Campaign Managers to see how our gifting platform works and to create an account.
