The terms “marketing” and “sales” are often used interchangeably. In fact, some people may often think that the sales and marketing funnel stages are the same. However, these two aspects are quite different. Marketing teams are often tasked with generating awareness around a brand – and everything associated with managing said brand – whereas sales is often centered around products/ services sold.
A great way to market a brand is with a gift that tastefully highlights it. A gift like this can also display the values/ morals of the company through the gesture. For example, businesses that are passionate about sustainability can highlight their fervor for the cause with an eco-friendly product. In other words, corporate gifting can be leveraged to foster goodwill among prospective customers and clients and to generate favorable associations with a company’s brand.
In this blog we take a look at the three methods of gifting available on our gifting platform and how you can leverage these when sending marketing gifts to clients and leads.
Marketing Your Brand With Direct Mail
With all the hustle and bustle of technological advances and so many new trends to keep abreast of; it can sometimes be refreshing to take it back to the start – well, maybe not the start; but rather to the good old days where direct mail was predominantly used to market a brand/ business.
Direct mail, also referred to as “junk mail” by some – as it typically receives uninvited – is a useful marketing tool. The right piece of physical mail can be an opportunity, rather than an uninvited little guest. That said, it would do you well to time the gift well and to target your demographic audience appropriately.
Let’s take a look at some of the use cases where direct mail can be a powerful marketing tool:
- Brand Sentiment: A corporate gift, is an awesome way to say “remember my brand”. Make the product an everyday, useful item – and mark it with your logo; brand colors, company mission statement etc. – and you’ve essentially created a way to market your brand and boost brand recall every single time the product is used by the recipient.
- Post-Event Lead Nurturing: Send gifts to quality prospective customers who have attended a webinar or other event. A gift can influence a customer’s decision making process or specifically, their willingness to do business with you. Understanding the demographic, psychographic and behavioral parameters of your customers will help you with a personalized marketing campaign.
- Customer Onboarding: Surprise new customers with a SWAG kit filled with branded goodies to welcome them to the family. Make sure some of it is personalized to make them feel special.
- Customer Retention: Part of brand management / loyalty is retaining customers. By offering a gift to your clients, customers etc. you can motivate them to make repeat purchases or do continued business with you; thereby generating good professional relationships.
- Product Launch: Giving customers or clients an opportunity to try out a new product or service – and incentivizing them with a gift to do so – will essentially help you debut the new product/ service to the market.
Marketing Your Brand With Gift Links
Gift links are Giftsenda’s take on seamless gifting. They are shareable gift links that are simple to use and convenient as well – seeing as there are no delivery details required. All that’s needed is a pre-selected gift collection, or specific gift, which is then sent to the recipient via a link shared on a messaging platform, via email or via social media. The recipient then has the option to accept, reject or donate the gift. Easy as ever.
For marketing purposes, gift links are useful when/ during:
- User Onboarding: Improving your customers/ clients user experience is essential; especially considering 40-60% of new users log in to sites and never log back in again. What better way to market onboarding than with a gift link that thanks your customer/ client for completing the onboarding process.
- Feature Announcement: New features can easily be missed but you can announce a new feature on your site and get people to check it out; all while incentivizing them to do so with a great gift. You can integrate your CRM to the Giftsenda platform to streamline sending feature announcements and gift links as these give you access to a wealth of information right at your fingertips.
- Brand Engagement Rewards: Creating an attachment between your brand and its audience can be a calculated move. Rewarding your customers/ clients for engaging with your brand is a great way to create an emotional connection.
- Meeting Follow-Up: After a meeting, it’s essential to retain the interest of a customer/ client for successful business. It’s also important to show appreciation after a meeting as this fosters a positive relationship or environment. An ideal way to do just this is with a gift link.
- Brand Ambassador Appreciation: An amazing corporate gift may be just what you need to turn your best customers/ clients into brand loyalists. Rewarding your brand ambassadors for their support on social media – with a gift link shared in their DMs – can be priceless.
Marketing Your Brand With Email Gift Invites
Delivering a gift link through a personalized, branded email is essentially the magic of an email gift invite. And once the gift link is accessed by the recipient, it’s business as usual – the gift receiver can choose to accept the gift / a gift from a pre-curated collection, donate it to an NPO or swap the gift . Upon accepting the gift, the recipient simply needs to fill in their delivery information to finalize the transaction.
- Welcome Email: We all know the standard “Thanks for signing up/ purchasing …” email you get when you’ve signed up for a service or made a purchase. But rather than telling your customers/ clients what they already know (they’re aware they’ve signed up or made a purchase), why not reward or thank them for their efforts. You can also automate a workflow for this using our Zapier integration and save yourself the time and energy if you’d had to manually complete the process.
- Product / Service Survey: Let your audience know you’d love to hear what they’re trying to achieve with your brand with a product/ service survey. This will keep them engaged and help you improve on areas that require such.
- Virtual Coffee Chat: Extend a virtual coffee chat invitation to customers, prospects or partners, using an inviting email complete with time slots to choose from. You can create a workflow to automate a gift invite email once the meeting has been accepted. A link within the email entitles them to a free coffee delivery, turning a digital invite into a sensory experience.
- Virtual Product Tour Invitation: An engaging virtual product tour allows users to participate more deeply with your brand than a simple clickthrough experience. Invite customers or clients to join in with the incentive of receiving a gift afterwards. You can automatically send the gift using a workflow with an email invitation.
- Referral Marketing Rewards: Referral marketing can help you leverage your existing fan base to build relationships with new ones. But don’t simply stop there. Solidify connections with your audience by rewarding them for their referral efforts using an email gift invite.
By harnessing these gifting strategies, your business can craft genuine connections, nurture engagement, and ensure a legacy of memorable interactions. For a visual guide that unveils the art of gifting for marketing, dive into our accompanying infographic. It’s more than a guide; it’s a blueprint to elevate your business relationships to unparalleled heights.
