4 steps to stress-free gifting for your customer experience team

These 4 steps ensure your CX gifting programme remains stress-free…

Matter
Matter
Nov 6 · 4 min read
A corporate gifting campaign run by Matter.

Customers love gifts. And personalised gifts are even better. When done right, a personalised gift acts as an inventive and memorable touchpoint. It shows customers that your company cares about them. It also helps communicate your ethos.

A good gift can build long-lasting and loyal customer relationships.

But if you’re a customer experience manager, you know gifting is a balancing act. You want to delight customers and empower your team to achieve their goals.

Equally, gifting requires time and money. And when gifts aren’t executed well, the whole process can turn into a logistics nightmare. So how do you ensure your team’s gifting programme delivers good Return on Investment?

Make it memorable

Over 80% of C-suite executives believe business gifts generate measurable positive ROI. That’s besides the more diffuse or intangible benefits.

Gift recipients tend to be highly satisfied with the gifts they receive. But satisfaction is not the same as delight. And what kind of customer experience team would you be if you settled for satisfaction?

Delight breeds memorability. Memorability drives the connectedness and loyalty that creates ROI.

Your gift needs these 2 things

There are two foundational elements to delightful gifts:

  • Relevance to the recipient
  • Personalised messaging

You’ll notice they are two basic elements you would expect from a gift if you received it from a friend. That’s because gifting is all about signalling that you genuinely care. Simply paying lip service to the idea won’t work.

The Business Gift Satisfaction Survey has an interesting stat here. 57% of respondents think ‘gifts can impact their opinion of a business partner both positively and negatively’. So consumers are pretty open about how swayed they are by gifts.

Don’t make this mistake

A simple way to avoid negative impact is by ditching your logo.

The era of customer experience teams branding their gifts is over. Recipients perceive items with logos as marketing collateral, not gifts. And the purpose of branding can backfire in this case.

Companies feel compelled to put their logo on gifts so recipients remember them. But data shows people are more likely to forget a gift they consider to be marketing collateral. So leave the branding for marketing campaigns.

So what can you do to make sure your gift programme works seamlessly? Ultimately, it’s a four-part process.

4 steps to stress-free gifting

There are four key steps to lowering risk of gift programmes:

  • Plan. Plan. Plan. Make sure the gift aligns with your brand. A vegan food company wouldn’t send jelly sweets. Make sure your gift makes sense to your customers. Gifts that break, go bad, or flout customs’ rules are absolute no-goes
  • Listen-up. Use your database, surveys, social listening tools and feedback from all customer-facing staff. All these channels can add value to getting gifts right.
  • Tool-up. Sending gifts to customers shouldn’t be hard. Empower them with the tools to succeed. With Matter, your team can send gifts in as little as three clicks. It’s as easy as sending an email.
  • Measure. By hooking into your CRM, Matter helps you capture data when you push customers online. You can do this with the help of discount codes or QR codes [LINK TO QR CODE ARTICLE]. Now you can track tangible ROI, so you can stop guessing.

Integrate these four steps into your gifting strategy and you can have confidence your gift programme is working.

Send personalised gifts in 3 clicks

Let’s take a moment to imagine what sending a gift should look like.

You’re chatting with a customer — let’s call him Mike — and you have Mike’s CRM profile on screen. You decide a cupcake would make his day.

You open an app that’s integrated within your CRM and select your goal — renewal, apology or door-opener, etc. You then write a short customised message and hit send.

Wow. That felt easy. And no sticky tape required! Everything taken care of by this magical third-party fulfilment service (*cough cough*).

That’s the simple bit, now for the smart bit.

Nudge customers back online

So, your cupcake goes out same day. This time there’s a QR code on the box, or even the cake itself. Intriguing. Mike scans it to check who the gift is from.

The next thing you know, Mike’s on a landing page with a relevant offer or useful resource. The circle’s complete.

Mike’s online, trackable, engaged and, most of all, he’s happy. All without the hassle or guesswork you usually associate with gifting.

You’ve just discovered Matter. The effortless way to send customers personalised gifts in just three clicks.

And that’s why customers are already flocking to use our Sending as a Service platform direct from their CRMs.

Do you want to understand how Matter will help your gift programme? Book your free demo now.

Matter

Written by

Matter

We help companies build better relationships ❤️ with their prospects, customers and employees through direct mail and gifting 🎁 at scale 🏭.

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