Why you should use corporate gifts in your sales funnels

In a business, sales depend on various factors and it is impossible to achieve it if you are following blindly just a couple of methods. There are many creative ways that can be used to increase sales. You just need to do a little brainstorming. One of the best ways to increase your sales and to make your potential customer aware of your services or products is through corporate gifting. Many people don’t relate it to a strategy to improve their sales and keep it confined as a behaviour of ethics. Sales funnel illustrates the steps that your prospects take to ultimately become your customers.

Many studies have supported the importance of corporate gifting in improving sales. Corporate gifting improves the goodwill of your business and develops the trust of your customers which helps in overall improving our sales. Corporate gifting gives brand recall to the customers. If you want your customers to remember you and your business then corporate gifting is the best idea to adopt. Any customized products that are useful for your customer will keep your business in your customer’s mind for a long time. 

Using corporate gifts in your sales funnel

Before directly diving into the benefits of corporate gifts into the sales funnel, we need to understand what a sales funnel is. A sales funnel is a series of steps created with the intention of guiding visitors toward buying a product or services from the business. A lot of business owners think that sales funnel is only helpful for online businesses, which is not true. It works for most of the businesses. It is called as a funnel for a reason. The numbers of people at the top are higher than at the bottom. Let’s understand what each segment of the funnel represents:

1. Top (Suspects) - This includes awareness of your brand. This has the largest amount of people. It’s at this stage that a customer will start looking to fulfil his needs by becoming aware of the organization or the business through social media, email marketing or content marketing. 

2. Middle (Prospects & Leads) – This is a stage where the people will show interest in your products and services. This is also the stage where there is an increase in the conversions. In this stage, the customer will ask more about your brand and will engage more with the organizations. Once the customer has gathered all the knowledge, he will progress ahead and will research more about the organizations in the same niche and the different alternatives that he has with him. 

3. Bottom (Action) – All the previous stages taper down into final stage: an action, where the interested person will purchase what you have to offer. By purchasing your product or service, he will become your customer. 

The most precious commodity in the business is customer engagement and gifting is the best way to engage your customers with your business. You can use corporate gifting as a customer acquisition strategy. Let’s say that an individual/ business purchased something from your website for the first time. You can send him his first connection gift. This way he will think that your business is trustworthy. The connection that you will make by sending him a gift is going to last for long. Corporate gifting improves your relationship with customers and also creates awareness about your brand. 

You can also encourage your customer to engage with you from corporate gifting. You can offer your gifts for capturing their email addresses. After getting their email addresses you can send them newsletters describing your past campaigns and their success rate. This way you can convert your leads into sales. The benefits of incorporating corporate gifting in sales funnel are humongous. You just need to be little creative.

Corporate gifting and prospects

Before selecting any gift, you should keenly observe on social media what people want and what they are interested in. It’s important that you research top 10 prospects that you are planning to do business with. Find out what they want and how they want it. After you have gathered all the relevant information, start engaging with them by sending them nice and thoughtful gifts. At this stage, your only focus should be to build goodwill. You shouldn’t necessarily expect business from them. It really takes time to build up your brand. But gradually you will find that your prospects are turning in to buyers, which is what you have always wanted. 

There are a few tips that you can follow to make your gift more appealing:

1. Personalization – Personalizing the gifts is the easiest way to make your customers happy. Suppose you sell kitchenware and you are giving away a knife to your customers/prospects. Consider engraving a personal message saying ‘For your kitchen’ with the name of the customer. 

2. Avoid putting a logo or your brand name- Gifts are different then promotional products. You don’t necessarily need to put your logo on the product. The intention behind the corporate gift is to show the gesture of appreciation to your customer. If the gift is good your customer will remember you, doesn’t matter if you put logo or brand name on it or not.

3. Not consumables – If you want your gift to be memorable, avoid giving consumables items to your customers because it will be gone in few days and your customer will forget in few days if you sent them something.

4. Timings -Though there is no wrong time to send gifts to your prospects, it’s advisable that you sent it when your customer least expect it. It’s very common to send holiday cards and gifts but your gift will stand out when you give it when it’s less expected. 

The whole idea of corporate gifting is to surprise your customer with a nice and thoughtful gift so spend your precious time in selecting the best gift because it is certainly going to pay you in future!