Measuring the success of your business gifting program

When it comes to gifts, developing a concrete understanding of your program’s performance can be a little tricky. 

Anecdotally, we know gifts can increase the affinity between the recipient and your business; but by how much? And what does that mean when it comes to the bottom line? Can you even measure appreciation? 

While it’s true that the whole impact of the gifts you send will never be perfectly measurable, you can create some easy tests for understanding the baseline impact of gifting related to your specific goals. 

Start with a clear goal

Whether you’re gifting to partners, clients, leads, or employees, starting with a clear goal in mind is the best way to ensure you can measure your program’s impact later on. 

Take corporate holiday gifts as an example; we often send these with relatively broad goals in mind that are difficult to tie back to what we send.

We generally use business holiday gifts to increase employee engagement or customer loyalty— both categories are tough to measure in any case, let alone how they’re impacted by a single factor like a holiday gift. 

So whether you’re gifting for the holidays or implementing a broader gifting program, it’s important to start with a goal that you can easily test and measure in mind.

Here are some gifting goals we recommend:

 
• Increase on-time renewals
 
• Increase close rate
 
• Decrease days to close
 
• Secure more customer referrals
 
• Get more positive reviews (G2, Glassdoor, etc.)
 
• Increase employee social media advocacy
 
• Book more sales meetings 

Define a program test

Sometimes when we implement a new program like gifting, we assume that if it’s successful, we’ll start seeing an overall trend that indicates it’s working without remembering the golden rule of testing: setting a control.

No matter what your gifting goal is, simply seeing an improvement towards that goal is not a clear indicator that your gifting is working. For instance, while you may suddenly see your close rate start to increase, in order to be sure this is caused by gifting, you’d need to be 100% positive there aren’t any other factors impacting that number. With so many people, departments, and technologies involved in this process, it’s tough to assume adding gifts is the only possible factor. 

Instead, we recommend dividing deals at the related stage into gifted and non-gifted cohorts and setting a clear time period for your test.

For example, if you’re gifting at the ‘client development’ stage, send gifts to 50% of primary contacts associated with deals entering that stage. Then, continue running this test for a set amount of time [ex. 6 months] or until you’ve reached a contextually significant number of deals to make a call [ex. 100 gifted deals, 100 non-gifted deals]. Finally, look at the close rate between the two groups to identify any trends. 

If you’re not seeing improvement or wish to continue optimizing, you can use this finding to begin testing other factors within the same goal set— for example, does gifting at a different deal stage have a greater effect on the close rate? 

Because how, when, where, and how much to gift is different from business to business, we recommend trying gifting at a limited scale before signing up for a long-term contract or cost-significant gifting program. With Loop & Tie, you can start sending gifts and measuring your gifting program for free, then upgrade for more features if and when you have a more concrete idea of what works; no commitment required.

Practice continuous optimization

Finding an area where gifting works well for your organization is awesome; but there are tons of ways gifting can improve performance, and just because something is going well doesn’t mean it couldn’t be going even better. 

Keep your gifting programs on a rigorous testing schedule; making adjustments as simple as changing up your subject lines has the ability to make a huge impact on your success. Here are some questions we like to ask to optimize gifting programs:

 
• Is there a different time in the relationship when this gift might perform better?
 
• Should I be asking for something, like a survey response or a meeting, at a different interval before or after sending the gift? 
 
• Do branded or non-branded gifts perform better with my audience? 
 
• Is there a different gift price point that significantly affects progress towards my goal? 
 
• Can I change my gift message or subject line to make sure more gifts are redeemed? 
 
• What feedback am I getting about the types of gifts I send? 
 
• What types of gifts are my recipients redeeming, and what does that tell me about their affinities? 

Finally, keep in mind that no matter what success you’re seeing in numbers, the goodwill and brand stickiness you get from sending gifts is out there and working for you, even if it’s hard to measure. 

Are you ready to see how Loop & Tie can help you scale your corporate gifting initiatives across multiple teams? Book a demo now.