Lauren Alt-Kishpaugh
VP of Marketing
94% of top executives believe gifts facilitate a deeper personal connection and are important to business success. In fact, leveraging corporate gifts on the sales front can increase revenue by as much as 300%. Sales representatives who offer memorable gifts to prospects will stand out from the competition by creating an interaction that remains top of mind above the digital noise. Yet at the top of the sales funnel, offering corporate gifts to leads is often overlooked. Marketers specifically don't often consider integrating gifting into their demand generation strategy.
At Postal, we ran a test to see how offering prospects a $10 gift card to download our eBook would alter ROI vs. using a traditional PPC advertisement to drive downloads to the same eBook. Essentially, does offering people incentives for downloading Postal top-of-funnel content drive tire kickers and unqualified leads? You can read more about the experiment here, but the results were pretty eye-opening: the $10 offering drove 5.5x more eBook downloads and created almost 20x more qualified pipeline.
In this instance, there are similarities between corporate gifting at the top of the sales funnel and the middle of the funnel—if you want to make an effective ask at the top of the funnel, you'd be wise to offer something in return. This is called "incentive marketing"— a channel in which you can effectively tap into to boost conversion rates and drive first meetings, elevate your social media presence and engagement, boost your email performance, and generate more content downloads. The gifting ideas below perform as lead magnets or incentives—and they can all be automatically sent and distributed from the Postal platform.
Landing Page Ideas
One way to employ incentive marketing is to reward top-of-funnel prospects who complete a specific action on your website. Here are few ideas to get started:
$5-10 Gift Cards for eBook Downloads
Offering a gift card in exchange for downloading your eBook will more than double your number of form fills. For even better results, try offering a gift card that's relevant to your piece of content.
$100+ Prizes for Form Completion
Want to quickly build up your lead list? Host a giveaway in which each person who fills out your form is entered into a drawing for a prize of at least $100 in value. This could be a monetary gift card, but you might also want to get creative by offering a curated gift basket or personalized care package.
Hidden Easter Eggs
If you're looking to get prospects to pay attention to your content, consider hiding links or "Easter eggs" in your eBook, landing page, article, or guide. This gamification of your content pieces will hold the attention of your reader and increase the retention of the material by boosting the time spent on the page.
Nurture Email Ideas
Lead nurturing campaigns are essentially a series of touchpoints to get your lead to the next step in their buyer's journey. However, most companies solely rely on digital channels to drive these interactions, which doesn't always yield the best results, and marketers often see a diminishing return on ad spend, driving cost per lead up over time. Try automating offline items to be sent at various stages of your nurture campaigns to incentivize leads to take action.
Offline marketing automation platforms enable you to set up gift Triggers from your marketing platform of choice (Salesforce, HubSpot, Outreach, Marketo, SalesLoft) to automate the sending of items that help convert your prospects to an SQL or higher lead score. For example:
Charitable donations
Show off your commitment to the community by giving your leads the option to donate to a charity of their choice. In fact, many executive-level prospects or customers may be unwilling or not allowed to accept gifts from potential vendors. This offering allows your prospects to engage with you, but also gives them the power to give back to their charity of choice.
Books
Want to position yourself as an industry leader? Automate the sending of a relevant book that shows your authority and commitment to the industry in which you (or your prospects) work.
Gift cards
Gift cards, yet again, are rarely a bad choice when it comes to getting leads to take the next step in a nurture campaign. Automate the sending of one via a Trigger, or offer a card through Postal MagicLink.
Ideas to Use on Social Media
For your leads who are active on social media, bring the goods directly to them and boost your profile's reach at the same time. Without paid advertising, it can be tricky to break through Facebook's algorithm and that of other platforms; gift giveaways generate organic engagement and favorable impressions of your brand. Consider the following simple ideas, all available from the Postal Marketplace:
- Chocolate: An obvious (but always effective) choice
- Charitable donations: Support the local food shelf that kept so many afloat during COVID-19
- Desk plants or flowers: Bring some life and color to a drab fluorescent cubicle
- Desk toys: Everybody needs a little more whimsy in their work-life
- Work from home essentials: Add some eye-pleasing professionalism to the makeshift home office
Gifts for Cold Prospecting to Book Meetings
Getting on someone's calendar can be a frustrating challenge for the average salesperson, but pairing that cold invite with a compelling gift can definitely help snag that time slot.
Gift Cards
As the saying goes, time is money. People are less likely than ever to give away precious minutes of their day for a product or service they're not quite sure about. Recognize the value of your prospect's time by offering them a gift card in exchange for a quick chat. From DoorDash to Target, Amazon, MasterCard, and more, the Postal Marketplace has dozens of options that will suit a variety of contacts.
Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life
The book Nonviolent Communication by Marshall B. Rosenberg offers practical tools to communicate effectively and get what you want. Offering or recommending this book to a cold prospect indicates your desire to uncover a win-win scenario for all involved.
Brigadeiros from Obrigaderia
Here at Postal, our sales reps love to send out brigadeiros because they're both irresistible and affordable. In fact, sending brigadeiros with a thoughtful message yields nearly a 66% connect rate for reps who send them to prospects. A 3-pack of these gourmet, hand-rolled Brazilian sweets is just $7.50. Brigadeiros are similar to chocolate truffles but have a softer texture and creamier bite.
Coffee or Tea
With nearly two-thirds of Americans drinking a daily cup of coffee, odds are that your prospect would be happy to be treated to a cup of joe or tea. The Postal Marketplace features many varieties from local vendors, so you can even choose a gift from your contact's neck of the woods.
Leverage Offline Marketing to Create Memorable Moments
If your company needs a way to capture the attention of leads early in their buyer's journey, you'd be wise to opt for offline marketing at the top of the funnel. Offering gifts that are memorable and useful can help transform cold prospects into brand advocates. With Postal MagicLink, you can scale your gifting throughout digital channels by simply selecting a gift, setting a budget, and then copy/pasting it.
Next step: request a demo of Postal to get started and watch those top-of-funnel leads roll in.