Rich Pusateri
Content Marketing Manager
The holiday season is approaching—the opportunity to enjoy some much needed downtime is a stones throw away.
However, before we prance away into our winter wonderlands, I wanted to call out another opportunity for professionals that produces a similar warm feeling: creating meaningful offline engagements with employees, customers, and prospects.
Here’s why corporate holiday gifting will do more than help go-to-market and people ops teams surprise and delight:
1. A great employee experience is the leading indicator of business success in 2022.
2. Hybrid selling is the future: with hybrid sales driving up to 50% more revenue and 90% of B2B organizations recognizing omnichannel as more effective, consolidating corporate holiday gifting into one platform is a huge saver of time and money. Additionally, studies show that gifts can increase sales revenue by 300%.
3. Marketing in digital channels is harder than ever: 27% of marketing decision makers in 2022 don’t know which digital marketing tactic is working.
You already know the "why" behind company holiday gifts. This guide is intended to provide you with in-depth ideas and strategies to create memorable moments with the people who matter to your business.
Table of Contents
- The Do’s & Don’ts of Holiday Gifting
- Planning Your Holiday Gifting Campaigns
- How to Position Your Gift as a Kind Gesture
- Corporate Holiday Gift Ideas for Demand Generation
- Holiday Gifting Ideas for Account Based Marketing
- Sales Gifting Ideas for the Holidays
- Client Holiday Gift Ideas
- Employee Holiday Gift Ideas
- Corporate Holiday Cards
- More Holiday Gift Ideas
- Holiday Virtual Event Experiences
- Creative Services & Branded Gifts
- 8 Gifting Trends to Consider in 2022
The Do’s & Don’ts of holiday gifting for companies
Do:
1. Designate budget by team and segment.
* Postal Pro Tip: Postal admins can use Postal’s team management and budgeting feature to provide reps or users with monthly funds so they can track their spend as well.
2. Understand the goals, challenges, and interests of your recipient to personalize accordingly.
3. Be mindful of your humor and sarcasm.
4. Consider cultural nuances.
* Postal Pro Tip: Refer to our International Gifting Guide before executing a global offline campaign.
5. Express gratitude for partnership.
6. Establish a “Gifting Code of Conduct” in your organization.
* Postal Pro Tip: Bulk approve items for your team to send in Postal that align with your brand's image and standards.
7. Double check the recipient’s mailing and contact information.
* Postal Pro Tip: Use MagicLinks or gift emails to enable your recipient to provide their mailing address and ensure address verification.
Don't:
1. Make assumptions the recipient celebrates certain holidays.
2. Put off planning a holiday gifting campaign until the last minute.
3. Use cliché or overgeneralized holiday messaging.
4. Forget to double check your recipient list and ensure it includes everyone.
5. Over-personalize or try predicting someone’s interests without enough information.
6. Intrude on privacy.
7. Come off as promotional or have your gesture sound like a bribe.
Download: Claim your copy of our 2022 Holiday Catalog to light up your gifting strategy
Planning your holiday gifting campaigns
Planning custom and curated gifting campaigns for the holiday season has never been easier—Global Offline Engagement platforms like Postal enable you to integrate gifts and experiences as a channel within digital campaigns to deliver a more holistic and memorable brand experience.
By diversifying marketing channels with personalized experiences, Postal customers see:
- 4x growth in pipeline
- 30% increase in close rate
- 55% increase in sales conversion rate
Sales, marketing, customer success, and people ops teams can use offline engagement to elevate and manage relationships with the people who matter most in their day-to-day life. There’s no better time of year than the months leading up to the holiday season to start defining your objectives and planning your gifting campaigns to increase sales velocity, drive ROI, and create lasting impressions.
Quick note: global supply chain delays aren’t expected to end in 2022. They are affecting the logistics industry, creating longer than normal wait times on goods coming from all over the world. It’s imperative that businesses looking to send gifts this holiday season buffer lots of extra time for planning.
If you’re a Postal Customer, reach out to your customer success manager to discuss a holiday gift strategy and key dates to ensure on time delivery. Here are a few warehousing deadlines:
Thanksgiving: Order by November 4th
Hanukkah: Order by December 2nd
Christmas: Order by December 9th
How to position your gift as a kind gesture
Get your gears turning on how to offer a gift without it coming off as a bribe. Here are six ways to position your gift as a gesture.
1. “Wishing you the best holiday season...”
2. “I can’t thank you enough for taking this meeting with me. I want to express my gratitude with an early holiday present from one of my favorite marketplace vendors...”
3. “Happy {Insert day of the week}! As a much needed break is around the corner for many of us, I wanted to send a little something to help you relax and recharge this holiday season...”
4. “I wanted to make a charitable donation on your behalf this holiday season...”
5. “Happy Holidays from ____!”
6. I put together a collection of my favorite things this holiday season, enjoy a magical surprise! Thanks for being a wonderful [customer, teammate, prospect]. Very grateful for you.
Corporate holiday gift ideas for demand generation
Engage your top of funnel leads this holiday season with gifts that convert & drive action
Postal customers have been using the offline channel to boost conversion rates, elevate social media presence and engagement, boost email performance, and generate more content downloads.
Here are a few use cases:
- Offer a holiday-themed gift in exchange for downloading your eBook or filling out a demo form.
- Host a giveaway in which each person who fills out your form (webinar, eBook, white paper, report, etc.) is entered into a drawing for a festive prize.
- Gamify a PDF, landing page, guide, or article by hiding seasonal items as “Golden Tickets” using a Postal MagicLink to hold the attention of your reader and increase the retention of the material by boosting the time spent on the page.
- Automate gift offerings to be sent at various stages of your nurture campaigns to incentivize leads to take action like booking a meeting (use one of our calendar integrations to make this super easy!)
- Go with a punny message: “I’d love to get a meeting with you to show you something sweet. In the meantime, here’s some of my favorite holiday cookies.” or “Our solution will surely spice up your game. Try these festive seasonings on us.”
- Run a holiday-themed giveaway campaign on social media—gift giveaways generate organic engagement and create favorable impressions of your brand.
Postal is critical to any demand generation or customer marketing strategy. It has helped us to increase conversion rates, accelerate the buying cycle, grow our advocacy engine, and delight new and returning customers at important moments along their journey.
- Emily Popson, Senior Director of Demand & Customer Marketing, CallRail
Top of funnel holiday gift ideas
The following corporate holiday food gifts are a few examples of items you could use to amplify demand generation campaigns—all are guaranteed to leave your recipient with a smile on their face and a satisfied belly.
Holiday gifting ideas for account-based marketing
Use offline engagement as a part of your account-based marketing strategy to drive more qualified leads during the holidays
87% of B2B marketers are using ABM to drive a higher ROI. The expansive variety of holiday gift options in the Postal Marketplace makes it easy for you to take conversations with key stakeholders and decision makers to the next level.
Personalizing gifts and sending at scale can be a logistical nightmare without a marketing automation tool like Postal. Between Postal’s global marketplace and Paper Plane Agency who will help you source and manage highly curated and branded specialty items; we have you covered. Our team will help you create an experience that is guaranteed to surprise and delight your prospects, customers, and teammates.
88% of marketers who used personalization see a measurable lift in business results.
Here are a few of our favorite gift offerings that will take any of your corporate “Season’s Greetings” to the next level.
ABM holiday gift ideas
Sales gifting ideas for the holidays
Offer a tangible token of appreciation for your prospect’s time this holiday season
The outcome of integrating an offline strategy within a sales process is scientifically proven. Studies show that sales reps generate more than twice as much revenue when they distribute a small gift at the onset of their negotiations.
Cutting through the noise this holiday season won’t be as easy as offering your prospect a Starbucks gift card to get a peppermint latte in exchange for a meeting. Here are a few unique holiday gift ideas and positioning inspiration that you can use to get your prospects to take action this holiday season.
- Give prospects the option to donate to a charity of their choice: “In recognition of the season of giving, I’d love to make a donation on your behalf.”
- Start their day right with a Breakfast Gift Basket that includes a local coffee or tea: “Winter is here—I hope this cozy breakfast goodie basket helps you ease into the season.”
- Winter Mix Baked Goods Gift Tower: “I wanted to share with you one of my favorite winter themed gifts. Would you be interested in grabbing some time with me later this week?”
Postal helps create relationships pre-sales and continue to build them post-sales. Understanding how it impacts deal cycles is the big ticket item for us.
- Mike Wendahl, Regional Vice President, Mid-Market Sales, Seismic
More holiday ideas under $25 for prospects
Client holiday gift ideas
Celebrate big wins with personalized gifts and experiences that keep you top of mind to build brand loyalty & establish trust
If your role involves customer success or support, you know the importance of advocacy and renewals. You may have even heard that increasing customer retention rates by 5% can increase profits anywhere from 25-95%. Furthermore, 70% of buying experiences are based on how a customer feels they are being treated. Here are some more holiday gifts for customers to impress, surprise, and delight your valuable clientele.
Client holiday gifts
From corporate holiday boxes to high end client holiday gifts, Postal’s Gifting Marketplace and Paper Plane Agency will support all of your customer engagement efforts. Explore some of our favorite holiday items for customers and some positioning inspiration for you to boost loyalty and drive renewals.
- Puzzles from Jiggy Puzzles: “Enjoy some entertainment on me during the next snow day.”
- JBL Clip 4 Portable Bluetooth Speaker: “Hearing your feedback means the world to our team. As a token of our appreciation, here’s something for you to listen to your favorite tunes.”
- Coquito Home Kit: “Seasons greetings from our success team! We wanted to surprise you with this authentic coquito making kit.
Postal is great for showing my appreciation to our customer base. It's an awesome platform to effortlessly send gifts, swag and other items without having to know their mailing info. I really love the ability to send a collection of items and have the customer pick out what they like best!
- Ross Van Praag, Senior Customer Success Manager, LeanData
More holiday gifts for clients
Employee holiday gift ideas
Boost productivity & team morale by sending new hire onboarding kits, thoughtful yearly gifts, or host a virtual team bonding experience
Organizations use offline engagement to bring remote teams closer together and strengthen the bonds of virtual workforces. Sending offline items to employees increases happiness and boosts productivity, driving more revenue.
As hybrid working models become more prevalent, this season is an incredible opportunity for organizations to bring teams together with memorable holiday gifts.
Below are a few company holiday gift ideas including the vendor who offers the item.
Postal helped to simplify our company's reward and recognition programs. Not only that, but we can run a report after a campaign has been sent, it just works! I checked out other platforms on the market and none could compete.
- Jenna Gray, Employee Engagement Specialist, ACRT Services
Corporate holiday gifts for employees
Corporate holiday cards
Most everyone appreciates a season's greetings in the form of a handwritten notes or branded holiday card. The best part about sending holiday cards is that they can be used for anything: from a fun corporate holiday card to send internally, to a “Thank You” note to all clientele, physical communication requires 21% less cognitive effort to process than digital, leading to more emotional processing and increased loyalty.
Holiday cards from your organization are best used to increase loyalty and awareness, as opposed to promotional intentions. Be genuine with your messaging and consider how it will resonate with your recipients before sending. Use the Paper Plane Agency to include custom notecards within your holiday customer appreciation gifts or holiday gifts for clients.
More holiday gift ideas
As a Postal customer, you’re able to request any item from your favorite local businesses. If you complete a search in the marketplace and we don’t have what you’re looking for - simply fill out the ‘request a product’ form and we’ll get back to you ASAP. As for businesses who are interested in becoming a vendor, simply submit this form and we’ll do our best to accommodate your request.
Holiday virtual event experiences
Deliver experiential moments this holiday season. Each of these virtual experiences are available in the Postal Event Marketplace and are ready to go with event kits, hosts, and more.
- Lemon Ricotta Gnocchi Cooking Class: learn how to make fresh pasta from scratch.
- Winter Floral Arrangement Workshop: using the meditative qualities of floral design and the unique connection flowers give us to nature, a floral designer will lead your team through a meditative, hour-long program to deliver a calming mental health break and a restorative hour spent making something of beauty with their hands.
- Holiday Cocktail Making: celebrate the holiday season by learning to make some fun and unique seasonal beverages.
Creative services & branded gifts
Postal’s Paper Plane Agency is a creative service team focused on offline marketing design including custom kits, high-impact gifts, promotional materials, and merchandise. From ideation to delivery, Paper Plane helps you establish credibility and differentiation through every offline touch point, wherever your prospects, customers, or employees are.
Whether you’re looking for branded holiday gifts for clients, corporate holiday gift baskets, or other custom corporate holiday gifts, Paper Plane Agency has you covered. Explore a variety of creative holiday gift ideas for clients below.
8 gifting trends to consider in 2022
To help you get a better idea of the gifting landscape for this upcoming holiday season, here are 8 corporate gifting trends we’ve identified through our research.
1. Brick and mortar businesses are back
Data from the US Department of Commerce Retail Indicator Division suggests that e-commerce sales were up 14.2% in 2021. However, for the first time in a while, brick and mortar sales grew faster than e-commerce, with physical stores growing at 18.5% versus e-commerce growth of 14.2%. This is a good indicator that the retail industry and consumer buying habits are returning to pre-pandemic standards.
2. Live streaming and social influence will play a big role
New research from Sensor Tower found that live streaming shopping apps such as YouTube and TikTok experienced a 77% year-over-year growth rate in just the first five months of 2022.
3. Seasonal spending is set to start early
Studies on Black Friday say that although consumers aren't always on their phones purchasing items, they always decide what they'll buy while browsing for items. Data shows that it takes a new customer about two weeks to make their purchase decision during Black Friday.
4. Experiential gifts
85% of U.S. adults agree that experience gifts are a great way for both the giver and receiver to enjoy something together.
5. People will discover more seasonal products
This year it's expected that discovery will be higher as consumers spend more time debating their next purchase. They'll open themselves to new brands and products. Data shows that 39% of people discover new products through search engines, 33% discover products in physical stores, 32% of people discover new products on brand websites and apps, and 26% of people find out about new products through online ads.
6. Gifts that hold meaning to them or are personalized
There has been a 156% increase in searches for custom or personalized gifts.
7. Sustainability sourced items
In 2021, 4 in 10 shoppers said they’d go out of their way to find environmentally friendly gifts—it’s likely in 2022 that shoppers will continue to purchase responsibly and give items that give back.
8. Work from home / hybrid gifts
74% of U.S. companies either are currently using or plan to implement a permanent hybrid work model. 83% of workers prefer a hybrid work model and 63% of high-growth companies have already adopted a “productivity anywhere” workforce model.
That’s a wrap
Shop the Postal Marketplace featuring over 300 vendors with 4000+ products available to ship around the world and send the perfect gifts, boxes, and events this holiday season.
Learn more and request a demo to see the Leading Global Offline Engagement platform in action.
