Surprise and Delight Gifts

[Ryan]

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I always make sure that any gift I send is always personal, genuine, and relevant.

Here’s a personal example from when my wife and I welcomed our 9-month-old into our family:

I received three sends in response to this.

1. The first was a well-thought-out gift box with a baby bath towel, a toy for him, a hat, and a handwritten note saying how excited they were for us. I loved this send because we could use all three immediately and I could tell they took time to think through this.
2. The second was a gift from the company I work for. It was a letter that my boss handwrote giving us all the encouragement we needed as new parents along with a custom baby blanket with his name on it to keep him warm. We still use the blanket to this day, and it’s one of his favorites. Another great gift.
3. The third was a simple GrubHub gift card with the note: “We all need a break, especially new parents. Congrats!”

These were all well thought out, relevant to me, personal, and genuine. It you meet that criteria, you can’t go wrong!

[Wendy]

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I agree with @Ryan – whatever you do, make sure it is personal and genuine. This may take a little bit of research to understand your customers and what will surprise and delight them.

Personally, I love the handwritten thank you note idea. If you have their mailing address where you know they’ll receive it, handwritten notes are fantastic. Could you get your CEO to sign it with you? What else can do to make that handwritten note hit the mark you want? What about a follow-up phone call from the CEO to say thanks in person?

Gift cards are tough, IMO, and not as personal. That said, I do love receiving a gift card to Starbucks or Amazon – two places I buy from regularly. But that may not be true for everyone.

If it were me, I would start with what outcome are you looking for? Are you simply just trying to say thank you for being a customer or are you trying to get something else? Depending on the answer, you can start researching ideas that would make sense for your customers.

For example, last year we launched (what we call) an ask/get campaign for one of our clients. Our client is a non-profit community for female founders — aimed at helping them get access to funding for their companies. They wanted to get feedback from their community members — asking them what they want to see from the community — and also say thank you for being a part of the community. We created a program where our client partnered with an executive coach to offer 3 free sessions to their target list of customers. Coaching services can be very expensive, so this was a way for them to give their community members a hugely valuable gift in exchange for some feedback — plus the executive coach had the opportunity to grow her practice. It was a hugely successful campaign and one they will likely repeat in the future based on the feedback they received.

Hope this is helpful.

[Preston]

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+1 to @Ryan and @Wendy ‘s recommends – genuine and thoughtful.

With two new advocate community managers having come onboard, we recently surveyed our advocates with some ‘get to know you questions’ as a fun way to (re-)engage with the community and collect some data on their interests.

Moving forward, we’ll be able to align specific opportunities, surprise & delights, and community rewards back to that data. For example, no sense in giving away hockey memorabilia when we know the majority of the community loves football, soccer, and baseball… Some goes for types of in-person & digital events and other community activities.

[Nicholas]

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I just started at a new gig, and as part of the swag bundle they sent me, was a laminated welcome note. The extra step of customizing, printing and laminating something to preserve it was a nice touch.

[Jeph]

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@Nic this is actually very useful information, I would also like to ask have you had any challenges in sending out swag out before?

[Nicholas]

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The biggest difficulty is sending international and customs. I use Printful.com a lot, which is a print on demand service. One nice thing they do is print and ship from a supplier that is as close as possible to the recipient. So if you’re shipping to the EU, they’ll send it from an EU vendor thereby avoiding customs and speeding up shipping.

[Jeph]

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Thank you so much @Nic , I will definitely check out printful.com