I was sent some gifts from a zero-waste organisation I was ordering from. When I posted about this on my Facebook group, there were some concerns about gift marketing.
Here are my thoughts on using a gift marketing strategy – of sending surprise gifts to your customers – and how you can do it more effectively.
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Should you be sending gifts to customers?
In this video, I’m going to be helping you decide if giving gifts to customers is a great way to do your marketing or not.
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My Experience with Gift Marketing by Proper Soap Company
I recently ordered from a company called the Proper Soap Company (who I do NOT work with at all by the way!). The first time I ordered, they gave me some free soap off cuts. The second time I ordered they gave me some free bath salts.
Gift Marketing is About Surprising & Delighting
Now I think this is a really, really great strategy. It’s really made me, as a customer, feel surprised and delighted. And these are the key things – you want to surprise and delight your customers. This is really important in any marketing – that you’re giving that element of surprise will always make your marketing better.
So, when this happened to me, I went on to my Facebook group Marketing for the Many (where I help people with ideas and questions and whatever else comes up) and I knew there were a lot of zero waste companies in there, so I thought it made sense to share it, saying “Hey this is a strategy that a lot of you might want to start employing.”
But Does This Create Expectation?
The pushback that I got from this was, “Do you think this might create a bit of expectation of a gift going forward?” It was Tara who brought up that comment and she had a really, really good point.
Your Gift Marketing Should Surprise Them…
The key thing here is going back to that “surprise and delight”. I think it’s really important that if you’re going to use gift giving as a marketing strategy, you need to make sure that there’s an element of surprise and that you’re delighting them with it.
So, how do you achieve the element of surprise? You offer gifts irregularly. This should not be a systemised process. This should be a completely randomised process, so that they never know when to expect a gift.
…And Delight Them!
The other thing that you need to do is delight them. So, when you give them a gift, you need to make sure that you are really clear that it’s a gift, and really clear why you’re giving them a gift. And if it is just a random gift, saying that it’s a random gift is the way to delight them. Inform your customers that this is a gift.
This is something the Proper Soap Company actually didn’t do that well – they just kind of threw the gift in there. I could have easily mistaken it for just a mistake, and who knows maybe it was a mistake! But the key is that I think if you’re going to do gift giving, you really, really, really must make it clear that it’s a gift. Especially because that then also mitigates against the idea of them expecting the gift.
The One Thing to Take Away From This
The one thing I really want you to take away from this though is that gift giving makes sense, okay? And even if you’re not a physical product company and you’re a digital or a service company, you can still give a gift. It’s all about giving them something of value that you are otherwise selling.
You will have something that you are otherwise selling – give it to your customers because this is all about making sure that your existing customers are super happy, so that they buy from you again and again and again.
I hope that’s been helpful I’m obviously going to be making way more videos please let me know in the comments if this was helpful to you or if you would like different content on something else, I’m happy to make whatever it is that you want to hear about.