What type of gift-giver are you? Are you the kind to note down what your loved ones mention they want throughout the year and then buy something from the list for their birthday? Or do you wing it at the last minute? Chances are, like most of us, you probably do a combination of the two. At Reachdesk, we believe that just like gifting in our personal lives, corporate gifting is 50% science and 50% art.
We often get asked questions like “What gifts do people like to get?”, “How much does the average corporate gift cost?”, “How does gifting impact business results?”. Being the data nerds that we are, we couldn’t resist diving into insights from thousands of Reachdesk users to give you answers to these questions and more in the first edition of The global state of gifting report. In this special Reachdesk IQ blog, we give you some of the key findings from our research.
What is Reachdesk IQ?
Reachdesk IQ is where we take a deep dive into the numbers behind gifting. We call on our data science team and the Reachdesk Insights tool to harness the data from the Reachdesk platform to help you take a smarter approach to gifting. We share tips backed by data to help you take your gifting strategy to the next level, no matter if you’re a Reachdesk power user or you’re just taking your first steps into sending gifts manually.
What gifts do people like to give?
Just like when gifting to our family and friends “What should I gift?” is the first question we ask ourselves when gifting to prospects, customers, or employees. As you will know from the previous Reachdesk IQ blogs, the most important rule is to always make the gift meaningful and relevant to the recipient. That being said, we’ve looked at the data to give you some pointers on what gift types are most popular.
70% of Reachdesk sends are eGifts. It’s no surprise that eGifts rule most gifting strategies - they work miracles when you need a quick and cheap way to reach wider audiences and offer easy personalization - especially when combined with smart Amazon gifting. Marketplace items such as fresh food, flowers, and other physical gifts make up 15% of all gifts, and bespoke gift bundles the remaining 15%. Food and drink are the most popular gift categories for marketplace items with alcoholic beverages being 50% more likely to get redeemed than food items - but who didn’t need a drink in 2021?
Here are the top 5 favorite gifts for Reachdesk users:
Top marketplace gifts on Reachdesk
- NOMS gift box with 10 Gourmet cookies
4. Casamigos tequila blanco
5. Personalized handwritten note
Top eGift cards on Reachdesk
- Starbucks USA
- Amazon USA
- Uber Eats USA
- Deliveroo
- Costa
When is the best time to gift?
It’s never a bad time to get a pleasant surprise, of course, but when it comes to corporate gifting, timing is important in driving the best results. In the graph below we look at the most popular days of the week to send and redeem gifts.
Midweek is the most popular time to gift with the majority of gifts being sent on Tuesday and Wednesday. Gifts sent on Wednesday or Friday get a 30% redemption rate. However, one surprising result is that even though not many people gift on Saturday, gifts sent on Saturday have the highest redemption rate (32%). With flexible working hours becoming the norm, perhaps it’s worth experimenting with sending times outside of traditional office hours.
What gifts do people like to get?
An opportunity is 1.44 times more likely to close if a gift is redeemed than if a gift was offered but not redeemed so it makes business sense to send gifts that the recipient will want to receive.
We’ve found that our customers consistently get a 1.5-2.5x increase in the redemption rate of physical gifts (from our marketplace or bundles) over eGift cards no matter what the purpose of the send is or when in the deal cycle it was sent. You might think this is because the average value of a marketplace gift is higher than that of an eGift card ($21 vs $71). However, an experiment we ran with Reachdesk BDRs shows the value of the gift doesn’t matter further down the line and it’s the level of personalization that went into the gift that really counts.
Gift bundles have the highest impact on close rates with deals in which bundles are redeemed achieving a close rate of 41%. The average deal close rate for deals in which marketplace gifts are redeemed is 40% and 31% for deals in which eGift cards are redeemed.
How much do people spend on gifts?
Ok, here’s the million-dollar question “How much should I spend on my gift to see the best results?” At the risk of repeating ourselves, there’s no neat formula for calculating the optimal gift value and we believe the value of the gift is not as important as the strategy and personalization that goes behind your outreach. We do have benchmark numbers on average gift values to help guide you.
The average gift value in 2021 was $23.22 compared to $21.81 in 2020. The average eGift in 2021 was worth $19.73 compared to $18.41 in 2020 and the average marketplace item in 2021 was worth $53.50 compared to $49.06 in 2020.
The average gift value changes throughout the year. People are typically more generous in the holiday gifting season with a spike in the average gift cost over November and December. In December companies spend on average $29.65 per gift. The most expensive gifting month is June when the average gift costs $26.97. We see an increase in average gift value at the end of quarter perhaps because many teams turn up the dials to try and hit numbers. November and December are popular times for higher-value items such as marketplace gifts and bespoke bundles.
How do different teams use gifting?
Corporate gifting is not only a tool reserved for marketing and sales teams. Over the years we’ve seen Customer Success, People and HR, and Partnership teams begin to invest more and more into delighting customers, people, and partners with thoughtful, personalized gifts. eGifts are the most popular gift type across all teams. Marketing teams are most likely to invest in gift bundles and produce highly creative bespoke bundles. 
Read the full State of gifting report to find out who are the most generous teams.
So what have we learned?
- Use art and science for success - The most important thing to remember about running a successful gifting strategy is to tailor your gifts to your audience, personalize, and experiment. However, the data around your gifting can help you identify the best time to send a gift, how much you should invest in your gifts, and how gifting impacts deal close rates.
- Guesswork is not a strategy - If you want to make the best use of your gifting budget you need to be able to collect and analyze data on how much you spend on your gifts, what gifts drive redemption and how redemption rates impact your business bottom line.
- Experimentation is your friend - Taking a design thinking approach to your gifting can yield amazing results. You might have assumed that gifting on a Saturday would be a big no-no but the data says otherwise.
- The way to a prospect’s heart is through their stomach - cookies, brownies, and tequila are always welcome!
To find out about even more insights, stats, and gifting trends, make sure to read the whole State of gifting report here.
