The Recipient Experience

By Mary Matton on March 1, 2021

You’re sitting at your desk, at home or in the office, and a package arrives for you. You open it up and there’s a box from a brand you’ve vaguely heard of with a mug and a punny note that has some sort of message and CTA on it. 

“Companies these days are so desperate to get our attention”, you scoff. 

Then you turn your attention back to the marketing campaign you’re planning. 

See your campaign is brilliant, you’re going to send a branded box of tea and a mug with your company’s name on it to your top prospects with a message that says, “You’re our cup of tea.” 

Well… May we be the one to shed a bit of light on that irony? 

We get it, stakes for marketing and sales teams are incredibly high. You’re a massive part of the revenue generation engine that powers your business. 

But so much focus can be put onto your job, your output, your results that you start to only think about yourself, your results, your output in your work. 

But your job, fundamentally, is to make the business money. Simple as that. 

And yet with such a monumental task ahead of us, we keep using the same generic, gimmicky tactics to build pipeline.

We’ve shifted the focus away from ourselves but what will help you hit your monumental goals, maybe even exceed them, is by turning our attention away from yourself and toward the buyer. The people who are going to give your business money. 

After all, 86% of buyers are willing to pay more for a great customer experience, that’s just how valuable a great buyer experience is to a business. 

And so marketing and sales teams get a substantial budget so we can reach as many people as possible, to create moments in the buyer’s journey that provide that excellent customer experience. 

On average, about 9-10% of the company revenue is allocated to marketing (Earnest). 

With that much buying power and lofty goals ahead of you, it’s natural that a marketing and sales team is going to look for channels that prove most successful in capturing the attention of potential customers, can help deliver a more personal and delightful experience,  and guide them through the steps to become a customer. 

One of those high performing channels is direct and dimensional marketing. 

With about 18% of that marketing spend is allocated to dimensional mail and print advertising, there’s a lot of pressure for marketing and sales teams to have the highest return on that 18% investment as possible.

With your precious budget being spent on direct mail experiences, why are you creating the same generic experience for every single gift recipient? 

What if we told you there was a better way to leverage your precious budget to help you hit the audacious goals your team is responsible for? 

Well that’s what you’re here for so we’ll stop dilly-dallying: 

With so much attention now being put onto the customer experience, marketers and sellers, it’s time to turn our focus away from ourselves and turn our attention towards the customers, especially when executing corporate gifting to your top prospects. 

What we can all do to get more ROI on our direct mail and gifting campaigns is to think about the recipient experience. To become recipient-first. 

What Does It Mean To Be Recipient-First? 

The act of creating an environment where each step of sending and receiving a gift is centered around the person the gift is for, not the person who is sending the gift. 

Treat Your Key Accounts With Respect

Your team has worked hard to identify your top prospect at a key account, why would you use the same generic and impersonal outreach you’re using with other prospects?

Hint: You shouldn’t. Wow them with a personal and respectful gift. 

But not just any gift – an invitation to receive a gift. Every gift recipient who receives an Alyce gift has the power to choose if they’d like to even receive the gift that was chosen for them. That is a personal gift.  

From the digital gift invitation, any recipient can accept, exchange, or donate the value of their gift so that no matter what you send, your recipient receives the perfect gift every time. That is a respectful gift. 

Let’s compare this experience to the traditional way of sending direct mail: 

Traditional Gifting	Recipient First Gifting
Quantity at scale	Quality at scale
Tactic to create attention	Approach to create a relationship
Wasteful	Efficient / Sustainable
Self-serving and campaign driven	Episodic and incorporated in all of the marketing and sales activities
Solves a logistics problem	Solves a business problem

 

Which experience would you choose? Which experience feels like a “marketing touchpoint” and which one feels like a respectful, relevant, and relatable moment between two people? 

Whether your key prospects are working from home or their office, you can create a perfect, personal experience with digital first Alyce gift invitations. 

Focus On The Person, Not The Persona

The best way to use a recipient-first approach to actually creating personal relationships with your dream customers through gifting is to treat them as people, not a fictional character created to represent a user type that might use a site, brand, or product in a similar way – a persona. 

The best way to get to know someone as a person? Understand their #5to9. 

What does this person do outside of work that makes them a whole person? Are they a parent, do they have a green thumb, are they a major sports fan, do they have a favorite musician? 

All of these questions can be answered with a search through your prospect’s social media – or submitting your prospect for Alyce research if you’re a customer. 

Even if your prospect doesn’t have a large presence on social media, you can appeal to a person over a persona with a personal touch to your outreach, like a personal video made just for them. 

Look at their Linkedin profile, look at the recommendations people have given to that person, learn something about who that person is before you try to sell them anything. 

Take 15 minutes of your time before you ask for some of their time. And relating to your prospects on a personal level, not just a professional level helps you to create that delightful, personal customer experience that’s so coveted in the buyer’s journey. 

Because most decisions are made subconsciously, not logically, appealing to your prospects as people not personas, can help you build up a more positive subconscious sentiment in your prospects brain that will ultimately help you close that deal later on. 

Safe and Secure Gift Redemption

We’re all about being personal here at Alyce but some personal information should stay personal. 

Information like shipping addresses, especially in an ever increasing remote world, should be shared with a vendor in a safe, and secure manner. 

Trust plays a huge role in how other people perceive you, and if they want to continue engaging in conversations with your company. So while you’re creating moments of relatability, let us handle the moments that build trust. 

With a secure fulfillment process, recipients can sit back and relax knowing their personal information is safe and their gift is on the way.

You can bet your data is safe with us, our  Counsel has a whole show about Data Privacy. We take this seriously. 

Deliver a recipient experience so good, your buyers will thank you

No seriously. Alyce’s recipient experience, leaves folks so impressed they will actually want to thank you for it. 

To make sure you get credit where credit is due, we’ve included a step for your recipient to send you a note of appreciation.

Rethink How You Send, Go Recipient First

Shifting to thinking about the recipient is an easy, first step in driving a larger personal experience strategy at your company. 

Our CEO Greg says it best:

“If you can dig deep, change your perspective, and think about the person on the other side of your interactions, the psychological connection you create with them changes.

You go from a transactional relationship to a personal relationship.”

The easiest way to move your company from transactional relationships to personal relationships is to change your language. 

You may have noticed we never used the popular marketing term “touchpoint” when referring to the points in the buyer’s journey where you can build relationships. That’s because we believe touchpoints are an outdated term used to describe any interaction that your company has with your prospects or customers whether it’s positive or negative. 

We much prefer the term moment. Because what you’re really doing when you go recipient-first, buyer first, customer first is that you start to think about every interaction that you have with a buyer and how to make it personal and delightful. A “touchpoint” doesn’t fit that description, but a moment does.  

By taking a step back and putting your customer before yourself and letting them dictate how you market and sell to them, you’ll earn more trust, build a stronger relationship, and create long lasting moments with your dream customers. 

After all, it’s all about the recipient experience now right?