In the B2B world, there’s no one right way to use rewards for customers and prospects. Actually, it’s the opposite: The best B2B corporate gifting strategy requires you to take a broader look at all the ways you can optimize the entire customer journey.
For instance, if you’re spending your gifting budget only during the holiday season to thank your biggest and most loyal customers — as many B2B companies do — you’re missing out on a ton of opportunities throughout the year and the company.
Likewise, B2B corporate gifting shouldn’t be the domain of one department. There are many teams who interact with your clients, and every interaction is equally important. Prioritizing the experience during those interactions is key, especially since customer-centric companies are 60% more profitable than others, according to HubSpot.
Here are three departments you should involve first as you develop your gifting strategies and how they can use rewards to help them hit their goals.
READ MORE: Why Client Gifts Aren’t Just for the Holidays
B2B corporate gifting can help enhance your marketing efforts for both lead generation and customer engagement. Use rewards to increase email open rates, blog or newsletter subscriptions, webinar attendance, shares on social media, and more. Offering an incentive for a prospect to engage with your brand lets you stand out in a sea of marketing messages.
Once those prospects turn into customers, you want to continue to engage with them to encourage advocacy actions such as submitting referrals, writing online reviews, participating in case studies, attending product trainings and workshops, and providing feedback. By incentivizing such actions, not only do you make your customers more likely to buy more or renew, you also help your lead generation even more.
No matter how far along a prospect is in the sales cycle, B2B corporate gifting can help move them along and seal the deal. Offering digital rewards for attending demos or other meetings allows you to make the most of your sales team’s time by reducing no-shows. Beyond that, you can also solve sales challenges like re-engaging a cold lead or giving a waffling prospect one last nudge. Create a sense of urgency with deadline-based gift card incentives to get a call scheduled or the contract signed. Or simply start the relationship off on the right foot with a new customer by sending a thank-you reward to show that you appreciate their business.
When B2B companies think about incorporating digital rewards, customer service may not be a use case that comes immediately to mind. But by giving your support team the discretion to use B2B corporate gifting when appropriate, it can help you increase service satisfaction scores, not to mention customer retention rates. Even a gift card for a nominal amount can be enough to appease an unhappy customer after a bad experience. It’s just a matter of showing that you understand their frustration, value their time, and are committed to making it right.
For more tips on how your company can use corporate gifting, download our e-book on Using Rewards in Every Department!
Hannah is a reformed journalist who has more than 15 years of experience and now focuses on content marketing for innovative tech companies.
Hannah is a reformed journalist who has more than 15 years of experience and now focuses on content marketing for innovative tech companies.
