If you want to make people feel appreciated with corporate gifts, those gifts should reflect the person receiving and the relationship you have with them. This is one of the most important things about gifting, corporate gifting included.
Gifts do not necessarily need to be expensive or complicated: a small token can be very thoughtful if you find the right gift. However, if your gift is common and gets passed around between people, meaning everyone is giving out the same gift. Then it is likely that your recipients will not remember where they got this particular gift from and what it even means as it won't stand out.
In this article, Giftpack will cover the 6 steps to follow to pick and send the best corporate thank you gifts for your recipients, no matter who they are. Let’s check them out.
6 Steps to Finding and Sending the Perfect Corporate Thank You Gifts for Anyone
Step 1: Researching Recipient
Corporate gifting is a strategy that many marketers or salespeople will use to increase the value of their performance results. Much like any other marketing strategies, a target audience research needs to be in place. It is not wise to dive into the sea before you know what you’re looking for.
What to do
First and foremost, you need to find out more about your recipients. The more you know about them, the better you can prepare a specially tailored thank you gift. But you also cannot just get random information, you must have a goal in mind. So ask these 2 questions when you try to get to know them better:
- What do they like to do?
- What do they currently need in their lives?
Let’s say you’re sending a gift to the account manager of your biggest client. You know that he likes to play basketball but he also needs to take good care of his knees. From here, a good gift idea might be a pair of sports knee braces.
Step 2: Setting Your Budget
You always need to have a budget beforehand for a gift, otherwise you might have to spend extra time going back and forth to check whether the expenses are over the amount you can afford. In the case of a corporate thank you gift campaign, it is essential for you to control your budget.
What to do
Make a list that contains the total budget you are given to complete the gifting campaign and the details for each recipient.
For example, you can make a table such as below:
This table not only helps you keep track of your total budget, but also allows you to control how much you will need to spend on each recipient. You can add anything that you think is useful to the table. You can use Google Sheet, Excel, or other tools as a reminder so you can also do calculations with your gifting budget.
Step 3: Matching Gifts
Needless to say, picking the gifts itself is the most significant part of sending corporate thank you gifts. With a budget and information about your recipients, this part is made easier for you. However, you probably will still spend a lot of time looking for gifts.
What to do
Start with a brainstorm. Use the information you have gathered on your recipients and come up with a few possible gift choices. You can also group your recipients by their hobbies, interests, etc. The same group of people with the same budgets can potentially receive the same gifts. This will save you a lot of time.
Alternative: you can use Giftpack. Giftpack allows you to import recipient lists and segment your recipients. The service helps you collect information on the recipients. With 3.2 million products, the AI gifting solution will come up with 5 most relevant gifts for your recipients to choose from.
Step 4: Double Checking and Ordering Your Gifts
Just like everything else, it's important to check so you can prevent things from going wrong. Although it may take some time to double check for all your recipients, it is better than ordering the wrong gifts for your recipients.
What to do
There is no shortcut to this. Check your list one by one to see if anything is missing. Once everything is confirmed, start ordering your gifts. This step is the simplest of all steps but the most time-consuming. You will most likely have to go to different sites to order your gifts and check your budget along the way. On average, this process can take 3 hours for each recipient.
With Giftpack, double-checking your thank you gifts takes 1 second. Ordering the gifts is also instant.
Step 5: Packaging
Packaging your gifts is important! It is just like making a first impression when meeting someone. Yes, We all know that we shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, but first impressions are definitely a big part of the gift-receiving experience.
What to do
Since you have some information about your recipients, you might have an idea of what color and styles are their favorites. This will be your starting point. You can look for gift papers and ask your vendors to help you package your gifts. Even though the purpose of your corporate thank you gifts is to make your recipients feel appreciated, it wouldn’t hurt to remind them who is sending the gifts. So, Put on a logo and write a small postcard for them!
Step 6: Shipping the gifts
Back in the days when everyone came to work at their offices, all you had to do was deliver the gifts to their offices and your recipients could simply pick the gifts up when they went to work. Now, the situation is completely different. More and more companies are adapting to the work from home style. Many employees don’t go into the office anymore, some businesses might not even have a physical location. That’s why delivery has become a lot harder.
What to do
There are a couple of things you can do:
- Negotiate with your partner vendors to ask them to deliver the gifts to your recipients’ addresses.
- Find a shipping service that can help you send your gifts.
Both of these 2 methods could cost you more money.
2 Extra Steps after You Sent Out Your Corporate Thank You Gifts
Step 7: Tracking Gift Process
When your gifts are sent out, you feel relieved that it’s finally all done. However, not quite. Since corporate gifting is a strategy for many different marketing scenarios, you shouldn’t forget about tracking your performance.
Also take a look at our article: Improved Version Of Corporate Gifting Strategy Guide 2022
What to do Utilize the reminder sheet that you compiled in step 2, and add a column called “Delivered” to track if your gifts have been successfully received by your recipients. But this will probably require a lot of manual work for checking your delivery tracking.
Alternatively, if you use Giftpack’s service, you can keep track of all the important metrics once the gifts are delivered. You will be able to see all the metrics on one dashboard.
Step 8: Asking for Feedback
Feedback is one of the best ways to find out what your product is missing. It is extremely helpful to have feedback from your customers. Regardless of good or bad reviews, their first-hand experiences are very valuable insights for you to optimize your product.
What to do
Set up a simple email campaign for all of your recipients to ask them for any feedback on the gifts that you sent. Questions like:
- Did you like the gift we prepared for you?
- What was your first thought when you saw the gift box?
- On a scale of 1-10, how would you rate the usefulness of the gift?
- Tell us how we can improve because we will be sending you another gift very soon!
You can come up with more questions on your own, but in general, you have to ask questions that will bring you value.
Every company, SMBs and enterprises, is sending corporate thank you gifts. Many of them even have multiple gifting campaigns throughout the seasons. They understand that gifting can directly affect relationship management, regardless of what kinds of relationships.
Most people understand to that extent, but many have failed to do a good job with corporate thank you gifts. Follow the above steps to make your gifting simpler and generate more results!