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Success in business comes from being able to connect with your customers and making them return customers. A good gift-giving technique helps you to win your customer’s attention 100% of the time, which is a big challenge in marketing. It does not even matter the medium through which you send your gift. As long as your intended receiver appreciates it, then it is a good enough.
Gifts can also help you raise productivity by motivating your employees to work harder with a gift or fostering a spirit of positive competition amongst them. But whatever the motive for giving someone a gift, you must follow the following five rules for it to be a profitable undertaking.
Understand your recipient
When you give someone a gift he or she doesn’t appreciate, it may end up having detrimental effects, harming the relationship you have with him or her rather than building it up. This is especially common when a gift recipient has to pretend to love a gift they hated just to keep you happy. You can ask someone what they like prior to gifting them to avoid making this mistake. Alternatively, you can give someone a voucher and let them decide how they want to spend it. The good thing with a voucher is that it conscripts the recipient of your gift in finding the perfect gift for them.
Use gifts along the sales fulfilment channel
For businesses with highly targeted customers and those involved in high-volume business, a gift can be even more effective than marketing collateral. You can also gift sales influencers with your product if you are trying to capitalize on their positive feedback to build sales. The best thing about gifting as part of the sales fulfilment chain is that it helps in strengthening business-customer bonds and drives sales growth. As long as you are careful to gift more generously as a customer moves down the sales funnel towards becoming a buyer, this strategy always generates a good return.
Allow the receiver to have a choice
People love choices. And gifts are no exception. Nobody wants to be stuck with a gift they don’t like if there is the option to choose something better. So, when you give your gift recipient a choice of what to get, you are improving greatly on the gift-giving process. Studies show that over 80% of gift recipients wish to change their gift after receiving it. However well you select a gift based on your perceptions of what they might enjoy; there is no guarantee that you will be right. Always having a backup choice –like donating to charity – goes a long way.
Make it clear what you hope to achieve with the gift
A good gift is one that does not require much work from the recipient to become useful to them. With the end goal being to show your prospective customer that you can bring value to them, always ensure that a client understands the gift at first sight. Forcing a gift recipient to have to work to unravel the meaning of a gift undermines the very purpose of the gift.
Use digital tools for greater efficiency
Another way of ensuring that your gifting technique works is by employing technology to enhance the process. Electronic vouchers are some of the most efficient gifting techniques because they allow the recipient to choose the kind of gift they would like to take. The added advantage of always being able to tell when a gift recipient has claimed their voucher comes in handy too.
A digital gift from a corporate gifting company like GiftPesa whose eVouchers are redeemable at all major supermarkets ticks off all the conditions on this list by giving your recipient a gift of their choice that can be redeemed in multiple locations over any time period.
