But, to make the most of the direct mail channel and generate demand, you have to have a solid gifting strategy that speaks to your wider marketing strategy.
So how do you build gifting and direct mail into your strategy, enable sales teams to deliver game-changing results with direct mail and gifting, and show ROI for your efforts? We’ll give you some pointers with pro tips from the marketers behind some of the B2B industry’s most innovative strategies - Salesloft and Demandbase.
How to build a winning corporate gifting strategy
There are lots of components to crafting a winning gifting strategy that ensures B2B demand generation.
Here are our top eight tips for success:
1. Make it personal
Personalization is the most important factor in effective corporate gifting.
Always tailor and create a unique corporate gifting approach for each prospect. Think about who they are and what they care about, and make your gifts relevant to their personal interests and goals.
Kelly Walters from Salesloft gave us a couple of great use cases of this tactic in action. Firstly, when prospecting a potential client, her sales development representatives found out that he was a huge Star Wars fan, so they gifted him a stormtrooper helmet made of Lego which went down brilliantly! They also found out that another prospect was running a charity race, and chose to gift him a donation to his chosen cause.
The more personalized a gift is, the more effective it’s likely to be. So, always listen out for the signals and personal insights that you’re getting from prospects. Be attentive and ask questions that will give you a competitive advantage. Ask them about their weekend, their hobbies and interests. If you know they’re having a quiet Friday night at home, send them a Deliveroo voucher so they can have a takeaway dinner on you.
Surprise and delight prospects with personalized champagne or a birthday gift to really get their attention. After all, it’s what account-based experience is all about.
2. Use a tiered gifting approach
Treat each prospect as a unique case and adjust your strategy based on their persona and seniority. Since no two prospects are the same, consider the kinds of gifts that prospects with different seniority might respond to. After all, you wouldn’t structure your corporate gifting campaigns to C-level contacts in the same way you would those in a junior role.
Focus on higher grade prospects by giving them higher value gifts and think about your ideal customer personas, since organizations that have strong ideal customer profiles achieve 68% higher account win rates.
You can also use this approach when it comes to your accounts too. You can plan your gifting budget based on the value of the account – higher value or enterprise accounts should receive a one-on-one approach, as opposed to a one-to-many approach with lower value accounts.
3. Be guided by each stage of the sales cycle
Your corporate gifting strategy for each prospect or customer will depend at what stage of the buyer journey they’re at.
For example, if you’ve had limited touchpoints with a prospect and are less familiar with them, it’s best to start off with something a bit more generic, like an e-voucher for coffee and a request to chat from a sales development representative. But, if they’re a customer who your account executives know and have already had contact with, you could do something a bit more creative and personal.
4. Lead with reciprocity but don’t expect anything in return
Prospecting is an art. But, just because you’ve spent time (and money) tailoring a thoughtful gift to send to a lucrative prospect, doesn’t mean it’s the right thing for them at that very moment. You can’t book a meeting every time, so embrace the mindset of giving without expecting anything in return.
5. Take advantage of seasonal holidays to add relevance to your strategy
Gifting to prospects and customers around seasonal holidays is a tried and tested approach. Tethering gifts to national days like International Coffee Day and Earth Day is a clever strategy to streamline your offering and increase the chances of booking that initial meeting.
If you’re running a campaign around International Coffee Day, for example, you could send prospects a coffee brewing kit, complete with a personalized coffee mug. Or keep it simple with an e-gift card which they can use to grab a coffee on the go. The key is to keep your business in their mind's eye on those special days.
Pro Tip: Try to look for more obscure holidays to set up your corporate gifting campaigns around. This helps to surprise and delight prospects and customers by gifting at unexpected times of the year. If you need some inspiration for creating seasonal gifting campaigns for prospects, customers, and employees, check out our 2024 corporate gifting guide.
6. Align your sales cadence process with your gifting strategy
Establishing a sales cadence is a great way to help keep your business top of mind for prospects. So, why not further amplify the effectiveness of your sales cadence strategy by aligning it with your gifting strategy.
Instead of simply sending a cold email followed by a cold call, you could make tactical gift sends to relevant prospects and customers in-between calls and emails. The addition of a gift strengthens your offering to a prospect by helping you stand out.
It’s also a good idea to align your sales cadence process with your brand’s wider marketing strategy and planned campaigns and events, to keep everything streamlined.
7. Use a corporate gifting and direct mail tool like Reachdesk
Automation speeds up the corporate gifting process and makes it easier to measure the ROI of your team’s efforts.
When investing in a tool, like Reachdesk, the key is to encourage your sales team to adopt the tool by running onboarding workshops and refresher sessions, as well as supplying a steady budget for them to utilize. Reminding your team that the tool is at their disposal and making it easy to use is paramount to its success.
8. Celebrate wins with clients and customers
Corporate gifting can be used to increase the chance of client renewals. Sending champagne when the anniversary of your partnership is coming up shows them just how much your business values their custom. This tactic also works with at-risk accounts, as it reminds them why they need you.
How to measure the ROI of your corporate gifting strategy
Ideating a creative corporate gifting campaign is one thing, but what really matters at the end are the results.
We’ve all heard about direct mail and corporate gifting that it’s difficult to measure the return on investment of your campaigns. However, this doesn’t need to be the case. In fact, all of your gifting campaigns can tie back into your revenue if you’re using the right tools.
The reality is, if you know what your performance looks like, you can set more meaningful goals. 
Here are a couple of examples of metrics you can monitor to track the effectiveness of your corporate gifting campaigns:
Redemption rates
To track the success of your corporate gifting campaign, you can look at how much of what is being spent is being redeemed and how much of that is going into the sales pipeline. Additionally, using this metric to measure success makes planning easier because it’s also a predictor for what your business is likely to spend on gifts, too.
Marketing influenced opportunities
There are lots of attribution models that you can use to measure conversion, such as first-touch and last-touch attribution. However, regardless of the specific approach that your team uses, there should be a clear correlation between your gifting campaign efforts and the opportunities created as a result.
Pro Tip: If you're a Salesforce user, you can now easily track the ROI of your gifting campaigns within the Reachdesk dashboard with our Insights tool.
The bottom line is, you shouldn’t just be pouring money into corporate gifting and direct mail without a solid strategy and understanding of the return on investment that you’re getting – you and your team should always be thinking about the end goal.
Wrapping up
Creating a corporate gifting and direct mail strategy can provide fantastic opportunities for your business to forge deeper connections with prospects and customers. Just remember to personalize your offerings, take advantage of seasonal holidays, and streamline your strategy with a corporate gifting and direct mail tool like Reachdesk.
Watch our latest webinar on demand, all about Generating Demand Through Scalable Gifting for more corporate gifting insights from powerhouse ABX marketers Alex Olley, CRO of Reachdesk, Leanne Chescoe, Senior Manager EMEA Marketing at Demandbase and Kelly Walters, Senior Marketing Manager EMEA at Salesloft
