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.
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.
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.
Here are the top 5 favorite gifts for Reachdesk users:
5. Personalized handwritten note
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.
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.
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.
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.
To find out about even more insights, stats, and gifting trends, make sure to read the whole State of gifting report here.