9 Steps to Finally Get Gifting in 2024

By Mary Matton on December 11, 2023

B2B gifting is one of the most effective ways to stand out from the noise of marketing emails, sales calls, and LinkedIn connection requests.

Why? Unlike these traditional, attention-seeking tactics, gifting’s superpower comes from its unique ability to force recipients to do a double-take rather than a single-click-delete.

When you lean in with value to give before forcing your agenda to get something, it paves the way for an altogether different experience.

But, like anything, knowing where to start can be challenging. The good news is this is all we do, every day.

To help you get started, we’ve put together a step-by-step plan to guide you through:

• Create your gifting strategy
• Launching your program
• Measuring your results

Now, let’s get gifting!

Step 1: Define your gifting goals

Think about what you’re hoping to achieve through your gifting program. Gifting can play a role over the entire customer lifecycle, and it’s easy to get overwhelmed when figuring out where it will fit best for your company.

The most common use cases fall among three teams: marketing, sales, and customer success.

Marketing

Marketing teams typically use gifting to augment their demand generation, field marketing, and ABM strategies. 

For a demand-generation marketer tasked with creating brand awareness and bringing new business into the pipeline, gifting is a great tool to help you reach your goals. Offering a small incentive for engaging with your brand can go a long way to getting those valuable leads in front of your sales team.

Field marketers who focus on events can use gifting to encourage event registrations and attendance, as well as a thank you follow-up for attending. You can also use gifting at in-person events, leaving a lasting impression on your booth visitors and creating a touchpoint for the sales team.

From an ABM perspective, gifting nicely compliments 1:1 and 1:Few campaigns. You can use your research and targeting to send hyper-personalized gifts that align with their interests and help you catch their attention.

It’s also an easy way to make inroads and start off on the right foot with other stakeholders that may be directly or indirectly involved in the buying process. Creating personalized experiences at scale is always a win for busy go-to-market teams that have a lot on their plates. 

Sales

Getting your foot in the door with potential customers is hard – there’s no denying that. But, a strategic gifting campaign can be the route to booking that first meeting. 

A 1:Many campaign that offers a gift in exchange for booking a meeting can be a game changer and is often used by BDRs to break through the noise of a prospect’s inbox.

Choosing a unique gift in the $25-$50 range and segmenting by persona to personalize the messaging can increase the number of meetings booked by 3x. 

Gifting is an excellent option if there’s an opportunity gone dark or you need help pushing a deal over the line. A hyper-personalized note or video message with a high-value gift can help awaken these conversations and put you in a better position on your road to success.

Customer Success

Did you know that creating customer advocates can exponentially increase your bottom line? On average, they’re 10x more profitable than a casual customer, and any referrals they provide are 30% more likely to convert. 

Recognizing and rewarding their actions can go a long way to building a reliable source of referrals, quotes, case studies, and more.

Plus, showing that you value them as a customer will likely make the renewal conversation much more pleasant and warmed up.

Step 2: Determine a gifting budget

Budget is often the first thing that comes up in conversations about implementing a gifting strategy. There are many factors to consider, and they differ slightly depending on whether you want to keep gifting in-house or use a full-service platform.

Thanks to our analytics team, we’ve determined that there are price ranges for gifts that work best for various use cases. 

Gift value: Up to $25

• Welcoming contacts in new customer accounts
• Intros to new strategic partners
• Inviting valued customers or partners to your event
• Sending employee appreciation gifts (HR)

                

Gift value: $26-50

• Rewarding loyal customers for their business, referrals, and success stories
• Celebrating milestones like renewals
• Prospecting for new business (BDRs)
• Re-awakening conversations with past leads (‘reopening’ doors) 

         

Gift value: $100-175

• Accelerating slowing pipeline deals (key accounts)
• Following up with post-event attendees (key accounts)

           

Gift value: $250+

• Making inroads by Sales Directors to executive decision-makers (key accounts)

            

If you’re looking to stay in-house, remember that in addition to the actual price of the gift, packaging, postage, and time spent should all factor into your budget.

With a gifting platform, the initial up-front cost may be higher, but you don’t have to worry about packing, shipping, and manual tracking logistics. Most gifting platforms also have CRM integrations, allowing you to automate your gifting campaigns and saving you even more time.

Step 3: Understand your audience

Knowing the right person and time to send a gift can make or break your strategy. Gifting isn’t one-size-fits-all, so researching and identifying the personas you want to include in your campaign can go a long way!

For example, if you’re selling a software product that’s designed to help product teams save time on development, ask yourself these questions to help shape your personas:

• Job title/seniority: This one is a little obvious, but write it down! Be specific about who you think will engage best with your outreach – is it a single end user or the head of an entire department?
• Pain points: People don’t buy products, they buy solutions to their problems. Highlighting their top pain points will allow you to connect the dots to how you solve them.
• Buying motivations: Sure, your product is a great fit for them – but is it a fit now? Pairing this with how you solve their pain points can create a compelling business case they can’t ignore.

Step 4: Personalize your gifts

Now comes the fun part. Once you’ve identified your personas and a list of folks who fit those personas that you want to put in your campaign, it’s time to personalize.

You’ve probably heard something similar: “Sell to the person, not the persona.” While mapping out personas is critical to helping build your target list for your campaign, choosing your gifts shouldn’t stop there. Connecting with your recipient’s interests and hobbies outside of work and what their 9-5 looks like will help you send a gift that knocks it out of the park.

Using our previous example of selling to a product team, let’s say you’ve identified the Director of Product Development as someone you want to engage with. After a bit of digging, you’ve found that:

• They work remotely and live in a rural area
• They spend a lot of time outdoors, particularly kayaking
• They’re a huge Bob Ross fan
• They have a golden retriever named Zeus

Instead of sending them a Yeti with your logo, consider something related to their interests, like a waterproof backpack or a Bob Ross pet costume (yes, it exists).

Some gifting platforms, like Alyce, can use AI to analyze the recipient’s interests and automagically suggest options for the perfect gift—the same amount of personalization but streamlined to save you time.

Step 5: Use a gifting platform

In addition to the budget, there are other signs that a gifting platform might be right for you. Sending a large volume of gifts, running several campaigns at once, or utilizing a gifting strategy across multiple departments are great examples of use cases for a gifting platform.

A good gifting platform can help you:

• Track your spending
• Manage your gift inventory
• Automate your gifting process
• Generate reports to track your success

Plus, most gifting platforms have lots of resources to help you get the most out of your campaigns, like email templates, sample campaigns, and best practices.

Step 6: Measure your results

Measuring your results is essential to determining if your gifting strategy is working. What success looks like for you will depend on your strategy, and different teams will want to see different data.

For example, marketing teams may want to track which campaigns are most successful based on gifts accepted, the most popular gifts redeemed, and the best time to send gifts.

On the other hand, sales teams will want to see the effect gifting has on their meetings booked, pipeline influenced, and overall revenue influenced.

Customer success teams will look more at the number of renewals or upsells influenced, customer engagement with the product, and any customer content created as a result of a gifting campaign.

Step 7: Track feedback from your recipients

It’s human nature to want to thank someone for a gift, and what your recipients say about what you’re sending can help support your gifting initiative.

Keep track of any trends you see around categories and values of gifts, and share that info with your team. It can help create efficiency when choosing gifts to include in campaigns and inform budget decisions.

Gifting platforms can help aggregate this information to make it easy to report on. For example, Alyce allows recipients to exchange a gift they receive for something they prefer or donate the amount to charity. You can then report on which gifts are most accepted and which are most exchanged and compare that to the gifts your team is actually sending. 

Step 8: Be flexible and adaptable

As with any strategy, be prepared to make changes and optimize as your results start rolling in. When you’re just starting out, you may have to make educated guesses about what you think will work best for your use case and audience. As your program gets ramped up, you’ll start to see where there are gaps and areas for improvement, and where you can double down on successes.

If you’re using a gifting platform, your Customer Success Manager can be a great partner in helping you figure out what’s working, what isn’t, and where to make changes.

Step 9: Celebrate your wins (all of them)

Don’t save the high fives just for reaching your overall goals – small wins count, too! Closing a hard-fought deal, getting ten more event registrations than you anticipated, or finally landing that customer case study interview you’ve been chasing for months are all causes for celebration.

Incremental successes are just as significant as big ones, so make sure you recognize all of your hard work and the results it brings in.

Get gifting!

At the end of the day, whether you’re using a gifting platform or handling your gifting strategy in-house, making sure you have a solid strategy with realistic goals and ways to measure them will set you up for success.

But who would we be if we didn’t offer some of our own gifts? Check out these resources for tips, tricks, best practices for setting up and running your gifting campaigns, and tried-and-true email templates you can use today!

B2B Gifting Insights: Steal These Tips

Ultimate Guide to Personal Gifting at Digital Events

20+ Email Templates To Use in Your Next Gifting Campaign

Gift Marketing Campaigns to Get Noticed & Grow Revenue