Corporate gift programs have the power and ability to take both internal and external business operations to the next level and beyond. Having a well-executed plan for engaging leads, clients, or employees with meaningful and engaging gifts could lead to huge increases in retention, closed deals, and repeat business.
What does it look like?
A corporate gift program is a well-thought-out and targeted strategy that involves sending meaningful gifts to an audience that is important to your business — employees, customers, and leads. Each one of these groups is essential to the success of your business and needs a slightly different strategy to have success, but at the heart of it, a corporate gift program revolves around the same principles:
Distilling these programs into these key components is helpful for reverse engineering a program that could work for your business.
Building a successful corporate gift program needs to be rooted in a goal. Knowing what you want to achieve in this campaign can help you figure out how to get there. Ask yourself what your overarching goals are.
Are you trying to make your employees feel appreciated? Do you want to foster a better relationship with your current client base? Are you trying to reach leads in a new and engaging way? These different groups will call for different gifts at different times to be successful.
Depending on who your gifts are for and what you hope to achieve, choosing the right timing for sending your gifts will be imperative.
When it comes to giving gifts for employee appreciation, there is no level of overdoing the gifting. People love branded gear and other fun gifts all year round. Multiple gifts per quarter would make sense to keep employee morale high and help you fight the Great Resignation that has impacted so many businesses.
But for gifting items to leads, adopting the same strategy would be seen as overkill. Sending one high-end gift at a predetermined point in the sales cycle makes more sense than flooding them with smaller gifts.
Choosing gifts is the culmination of knowing your audience, goals, and cadence. To choose the right gift, you need to leverage those three things into something that speaks to their wants and needs.
If you are looking for gifts for your remote employees, maybe something like a gourmet snack box or branded yoga mat would play well. For clients, something branded and valuable like a wireless charger or headphones would be useful to them and is a visual reminder of your partnership. For leads, something more high-end might be required.
Since we offer a wide selection of gifts, it might help narrow things down by budget, gift type, or even minimum amount. More likely than not, you will need more than one gift, especially if your program’s goals extend over a single round of gifting.
Once your gifts, audience, and cadence are decided, you need to find the right way to get your gifts to your targets at the perfect time. There are a few ways you can go about this.
One way is to order all of the gifts to one address and give them out yourself. This is the best option for those with a physical office, with some space to spare, and who are likely to contact their gift recipients in person from time to time.
Another way is to have orders ready to go at set times. Maybe you are trying to target leads ahead of a certain meeting or at the end of the quarter, or you know all of your employees’ birthdays and work anniversaries and want to place the orders at the beginning of the year or quarter. Just contact us, and we can set everything up ahead of time.
Corporate gift programs are the best way to retain current employees, a great way to connect with your clients throughout the year outside of your business dealings, and a unique way to break through to your leads no matter where they are in the sales cycle. Contact us today if you would like more information about how to put a gift program in place at your business or anything else related to corporate branding products. Garuda Promotions and Branding can help you connect with your audience in a meaningful way through branded and corporate gifts.
