Creating Sales Engagement Through Corporate Gifting

In 2020 with in-person conferences being redirected to online events, marketers are looking for alternative ways to continue to grow their demand generation efforts and ensure that they can drive quality leads into the sales funnel. One of those ways is gift marketing.

Marketing teams are allocating budgets and efforts toward gifting, as opposed to sponsoring virtual events, as some marketers are not seeing the ROI from a $10k+ sponsorship.

How can you use gift marketing in your company and what are some great use cases? That is the topic of this episode of the Modern Marketing Engine podcast with my guest, Nick Grant, Head of Marketing at Postal.io.

Postal.io is an integrated direct mail platform for sales and marketing teams that leverages machine learning to automate and optimize the creation, delivery, and reporting of personalized physical assets (a.k.a. gifts) in the sales process. The Postal.io platform integrates into HubSpot, Salesloft and Salesforce. 

Postal.io activities can be tracked in CRM, such as if the gift was received or denied, and reports on different metrics so marketers can know what works and doesn't. It can also trigger other events to happen, like an email or call right after the gift was received.

Listen to this episode to learn more about modern gift marketing.

How Companies are Using Gift Marketing

Almost every industry can use gifting to help with their marketing. One common way is to share knowledge by sending books.

The book helps build rapport with customers and it can be about something that supports content your business writes about or contain content that your prospect will find relevant for their specific business.

For example, Postal.io often uses Giftology: The Art & Science of Using Gifts to Cut Through the Noise, Increase Referrals, and Strengthen Retention, to educate their clients on how they can effectively use gifting in their marketing and sales process.

Although some brands have their own books, most don't. However, they can use books from recognized thought leaders in their industry. For example, agencies use books like This is Marketing by Seth Godin or Sales Engagement from the team at Outreach. These books not only educate their prospects, but also help position themselves as an expert in their space by providing these hand-picked resources.

Most books cost around $20 and are a very cost-effective way to experiment with driving more engagement at the top of the funnel.

Personalization in Gift Marketing

Although it is difficult to automate and scale personalized gifts, Nick says that he has seen it often in the SaaS space.

There is a lot of competition in the SaaS industry, so companies try to get in front of key prospects and get them into their sales funnel through personalized gifts.

"This is where swag can come into play," Nick says, "as you can do a bit of research on a prospect and often find out some info about things they're passionate about, like where they went to college or a sports team that they support. Just find what they post about on Instagram and perhaps send them a Yeti Mug with their college logo on it, or a hat from their favorite sports team."

Another common example is companies sending gifts that relate to their client's pets, like a box of cat toys. Such gifts help companies stand out amongst the competition.

An added benefit is that people get excited when they receive the gifts and usually post their pictures with the gifts on social media, raving about the company.

Nick talked about some interesting use cases for gift marketing in particular industries.

Finance and Real Estate

Nick says that clients in these industries are often introducing new services and they need a way to market them to their existing clients,