What marketing and sales strategies are your organization utilizing when it comes to opening doors, making genuine connections and starting conversations with potential clients? Gifting — particularly in B2B marketing or high-value sales — can get the attention of your target audience, accelerate your prospecting funnel, and strengthen your marketing and sales strategies.
Marketing: Gifting Gets People’s Attention
Most people don’t like the gifts they receive from businesses, but the right gift options can help marketers motivate people to give their time and attention.
Say you want to engage your target audience with a webinar, so you create an email marketing campaign to promote it. While the right design and copywriting are important, studies show that 95% of full-time professionals receive multiple emails each week inviting them to attend a webinar. Knowing that, you need to come up with a way to make your email stand out. The solution: Gifting.
Another study found that if your email mentions a gifting opportunity (i.e., a giveaway or everyone who attends gets a gift), people are more likely to open the email, join the webinar and give you their attention.
Whether you’re promoting a webinar, stoking brand awareness or trying to increase engagement at your next marketing event, using a unique channel like gifting can increase your reach and generate more conversions. Gifting helps marketers win people’s attention — half the battle of any successful strategy.
Sales: Match Gifting to Your Funnel
A well-timed gift can do more than motivate people into giving you their attention; it can also nudge them into doing business with you.
For successful sales strategies, the goal is to move prospects through the funnel and close deals efficiently. With gifting as a connector, prospects have an incentive to act, resulting in qualifying more leads and closing deals faster. Here’s how gifting can nurture and accelerate your sales funnel:
- High in the funnel, gifting and high-value marketing collateral perform the best. Gifts show that you’re motivated to win their business. The number of people you’re gifting at this stage will be high, so while gifts are important, don’t deplete your total budget quite
- As prospects move further down the sales funnel, gifting helps ensure executive buy-in and brings more people into the sales cycle, accelerating the
- Toward the bottom of the funnel, gifting becomes key to generating total buy-in across the company and turning the tide of opinion in your
- After a deal is closed, gifting can be used as a way to say thank you and an opportunity to
The Secret to Successful Gifting Strategies
At Cultivate, we know the most common problem with gifting strategies is that people often want something completely different than what they receive. Rather than guessing what they may like, you can invite people to select a gift of their choice. Do they want a new watch or a pair of sunglasses? Would they prefer to select a gift for their significant other?
The concept of choice allows the gift to be more engaging and personalized to the person on the receiving end.
Leveraging gifting for prospecting, engagement, pipeline acceleration and relationship building will help you stand out from competitors, create opportunities and close deals more efficiently.
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