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October 29

Corporate Gifts – Why Bother?

We’re heading into summer and New Zealand’s holiday season. Staff and customers alike are full of excitement about Christmas and the forthcoming holidays. Most businesses shut down for a few weeks to ensure everyone enjoys some down-time. And yet despite all this joy and happiness, it’s amazing how the words ‘What are we going to give as corporate gifts this Christmas?’ can strike fear into office managers, marketing departments or business owners throughout New Zealand. Most people love to give gifts to their friends and family, so why the hang-up with gifts to customers and staff?

Let’s first consider why you would want to present a corporate gift to your customers. Here are five reasons why corporate gifts at Christmas and throughout the year represent a GREAT investment.

1. Gifts help develop your relationships – everyone loves a gift and most people feel kindness to the person giving the gift. The psychology is no different in corporate gifting – your customers will be grateful and a little more loyal to you. It’s so much harder for a customer to stop doing business with you when they have received gifts from you.
2. When you’re in the early phase of what you hope will be a profitable relationship with a customer, it’s important that they remember who you are. Perhaps they’ve simply trialed your products or services, but you’re yet to be on their regular shopping list. Send them a branded corporate gift and there’s more chance of them remembering you, and ordering from you in the future.
3. A corporate gift is in fact a cheap advertising medium – consider a branded gift vs advertising and you will soon realise that it more targeted, more memorable, more long lasting and so delivers much better value for money.
4. It’s always nice to get a thank you, so consider a gift to say thank you to a customer for their business. New Zealand is a small country and your customers often have a choice in who they do business with. A simple thank you gift goes a long way to maintain loyalty in the face of stiff competition.
5. Don’t think of your corporate gifts as a cost, but rather as an investment. Why not even run some analytics? Identify your top twenty customers and then gift the top ten twice in the year and measure your return from those customers vs the other ten customers – you may well be surprised by the result, but we won’t be!

Then of course there are your staff, who have rallied around you all year to grow your business. It’s easy to say that that’s what they get paid to do, but remember that our employment pool in New Zealand is very small. Good staff are hard to get and even harder to keep. It’s the little things that keep them loyal, those thoughtful words, kind deeds and small gifts that surprise and delight them and remind them why they love coming to work for you each day.

Remember it’s not just about Christmas, so why not consider a range of gifts that are ready to hand out in recognition of good work. Perhaps it’s a pair of headphones or a branded Tee or an umbrella. Consider gifts that are thank you presents vs gifts that are rewards for achievement. Having a range of useful branded items, given for hitting sales targets can be a great trick for motivating staff. This is especially true if the item can be used each day but recognises someone’s status as #1 salesperson that month. The recipient will have immediate bragging rights and other staff will know they are a high achiever.

Corporate Gifts

Article by Courtney Murphy (Printing.com) | Oct 9, 2018