“Time-consuming,” "extra work," "tiresome"... do these words pop up in your mind when you think of business gifting?
From years of experience working with clients for gifting needs, we've seen some of the most common problems in corporate gifting, just to name a few:
- Procurement and logistics-related issues
- Transparency issues
- Pilferage
- Vendor management
- Customization and control
- No data on your gifting exercise
The way of how traditional business gifting works is unnecessarily complicated. We understand most of the decision makers in charge of gifting may still not be aware of the enormous cost behind it.
Therefore in this article, we list out the benefits of automated employee gifting, and hope that this list will either convince you or help you find different ways to persuade your boss to start the transition from traditional gifting to the future of gifting — employee gifting with automation.
The Idea of Gifting Automation
No matter which culture you are from, gifting is essential for business' success, and has been seen as one of the most effective ways of nurturing relationships, be it employees, clients, or customers. In traditional way of doing gifting, there are generally two ways to personalized bulk gifting:
The first approach is for you to spend time knowing each person’s personalities, habits, etc, checking on Amazon (or any other e-commerce platform) to pick personalized gift one-by-one (i.e. you’re the personalization part), and ordering them respectively.
The other way is much simpler: sending all-the-same gifts at once with “not-so-personal personalization,” like printing his/her faces or names on the gift item, so you have tons of time saved.
Both ways don’t seem to be ideal, do you agree? That’s why the idea of automating the process of gifting is doomed to be the new norm.
4 Benefits of Employee Gifting Automation
Gift automation systems bulk send products provided by you or vendors as corporate gifts on holidays, birthdays, and other special occasions.
These gifting automation services gives you much more flexibility at work. There are 4 major benefits when you choose to automate your gifting, including:
- Implement personalization at scale
- Scale up to maximize ROI
- Have a better control of your gifting budget
- Save time and effort
1. Personalization: implement personalization at scale
According to the 2021-22 Employer Gift-Giving Report, impersonal gifts can be a shortcoming in an employee gifting campaign.
Customization is a time-consuming process, but it’s the best way to represent how much businesses value the gift receivers. Despite the size of your company, when you want to launch a gifting campaign, we highly encourage you to put in the efforts to personalize every single gift you’re about to send.
Unless you're familiar with the best practices of branding with corporate gifts, you should consider working with a gifting automation company and do the following: instead of sending all of your receivers a mark with company’s logo on it, replace it with personalized gift tailored to each person.
Consider their individual personalities, interests, hobbies, age, favorite colors, as many things as you can. That’s how you show your attitude and respect with a meaningful gift.
Remember these tips in mind:
- Consider your recipients' personalities
- Keep current trends in mind
- Stick to your budget (which we'll talk about later)
- Gift something useful
2. Scalability: scale up to maximize ROI
Corporate gifting platforms are ideal substitute for the spreadsheets that companies often use to organize the gift-giving process.
These platforms allow you to manage everything in one place: your recipients’ contracts, delivery schedule, data collection, and tracking of user experience and performance review.
Take advantage of integrations, which is a core feature most of the gifting platforms have. For example, with Giftpack’s Slack integration, corporates can manage the huge amount of employee gifting at ease.
Scalability is often seen as the best part about automated gifting services. Orders ranging from 1 for VVIP, to 2,500 (or more) employee gifting campaign, why not just let the technology do the job for you?
We've gathered a list of top 10 corporate gifting platforms. You should go through the list and see which one fits your gifting needs the best. A common characteristic that all the top tier gifting automation platform has is the all-in-one dashboard. In one single tab, you should be able to launch the campaign, confirm the gifts, deliver, track, and review at the end!
3. Budget: have a better control of your gifting budget
Automating gifting reduces workload for marketing departments, which usually take care of corporate and customer gifts. By that, your company saves human capital that can be used somewhere else. Specifically, AI gifting has a great potential to help you save money!
Not just budget in the human resource perspective, gifting platform should also enable you to have a better approach to managing the budget of gifting campaigns.
Currently, your calculation during a gifting campaign might look somewhat like this:
price of gifts + delivery fees + (custom fees) + (additional fees) = total cost
This, most of the time, requires you to check multiple vendor marketplaces, local Excel files, and typing on calculator.
Using an automated gifting platform saves you from all those hardwork. You just need to know the number of gifts you’re sending, and you'll see exactly how much money you’ll be spending monthly on gifting platforms.
4. Efficiency: save time and effort
Automated gift-ordering system saves a huge amount of time for your business to operate the gifting process.
If you are in charge of employee gifting, and you are also a believer of the saying “time is money,” there’s really no reason you should do it the old-school way.
Say you have 200 gifts for holiday campaign, and you’re a perfectionist who is trying to personalize all the gifts you’re about to send. You spend 5 minutes chit-chatting (or doing simple research) with each of your employees to know them better. Then you spend just 10 minutes picking each gift. Lastly, you spend (under ideal situation) 10 minutes finishing all the latter processes (ordering, confirming, delivering, and reviewing if you have a system for it.)
Summing all that up, that’s 200 (people) x 5 (mins) + 200 (people) x 10 (mins) + 200 (people) x 10 (mins) = 1400 minutes (almost a whole 24-hr-day!) Simple (and pretty optimistic) calculation, right?
With gifting automation, you’re about to send 200 gifts within 30 minutes! Just imagine how much time is saved because of this simple transition from traditional gifting to automation technology!
Gifting (Automation)? Giftpack.
All these 4 major benefits combined — AI-powered, automated business gifting platform like Giftpack provides personalization at scale. Your corporate gifting journey is only one-click away. That’s the vision of Giftpack and the future of corporate gifting for sure.
If you’ve ever thought of gifting automation, please don’t hesitate to knock on our door. Simply sign up, or even type your messages in the chatbot we implemented on our website, our team will always be there answering your inquiries.