Creating Sales Engagement Through Corporate Gifting

Modern Marketing Engine podcast hosted by Bernie Borges

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, so they can try to get them interested in learning more about their new offerings.

“This is where we often see food-related items used to help get them into the funnel and engaged with the new offerings. Like sending a box of cookies or fruit basket with some information for them to review, which helps to make them more receptive to learn about the new offerings.”

Veteran-Owned Organizations

“We have a client who is a veteran and he owns a sales training company that works with a lot of other veteran-owned businesses,” Nick says. “He likes to leverage an American Flag as a gift to help drive leads into the top of the funnel. This was not something we originally had in our marketplace, but when he told us about his business we brainstormed and thought it would be the perfect item for him to use.”

In gift marketing, every gift should be tailored to the company’s unique business needs to get the best possible results.

Webinars and Virtual Events

With in-person events went virtual, a lot of demand generation managers shifted their focus onto webinars as a way to drive leads at the top of the funnel. However, with so many webinars going on right now, it can be difficult to get people to sign up and attend.

Nick says he has seen some really savvy SaaS companies using gift cards after a webinar registration occurs to help drive registrations AND attendance.

“We see them use a mix of charity gift cards, where the recipient can pick from a variety of charities, often going with someone local they want to support. Or having it go to a Covid related charity. In addition we see food delivery or coffee gift cards used as well. Being able to have lunch while watching a webinar is a great pairing and all of these digital gifts help build rapport and trust, so that registrants want to attend and see what the webinar is all about.”

Can Gift Marketing Contribute to Marketing and Sales Alignment?

Nick says that they often see marketing partnering closely with sales to help send out gifts to secure meetings with their strategic accounts that hadn’t responded to outreach in the past.

“This really boosts the ability for marketers to get these leads engaged and help sales to drive more meetings that they could with only relying on emails, texts, phone calls and Linkedin InMails.”

Through Postal.io sales and marketing can see what types of gifts are effective to book meetings, fill the pipeline and close more sales.

Don’t miss this episode to hear more about how you can use gift marketing in your marketing strategy.

Featured on This Episode

• Connect with Nick on LinkedIn
• Follow Postal.io on Twitter and Instagram
• Postal.io website

Outline of this Episode

[1:50] About Postal.io

[3:09] What is modern gift marketing

[4:50] How are companies using gifting

[7:20] Personalization with gifting

[12:14] How does a marketer track the gift in the CRM

[15:00] Webinars and gifting

[17:24] Gifting and Marketing and Sales Alignment

Resources & People Mentioned

• The Modern Selling Podcast with Vengreso CEO, Mario Martinez, Jr

Connect With Bernie and Modern Marketing Engine

• https://www.Facebook.com/modernmarketingengine/
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/bernieborges/
• https://twitter.com/bernieborges
• https://instagram.com/bernieborges
• https://Twitter.com/MMEnginePodcast

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