B2B Gifting Survey Finds Personal & Memorable Score ROI
Acculist USA supports many clients marketing in the corporate gifting space, with a focus on food and wine gift baskets and catalogs. We recently ran across some interesting data from a study by Knack, a Seattle gifting company, that should help gift suppliers to craft the most appealing packages and business gift buyers to maximize gift effectiveness.
The C-suite Believes in Gifting ROI
The good news from the Knack “Business Gift Satisfaction Survey” is that corporate gifting works well when it is done well: 57% of respondents said that “gifts can impact their opinion of a business partner both positively and negatively.” In fact, over 80% of C-suite executives surveyed said they believe that business gifts generate measurable positive ROI in addition to intangible benefits. Since there’s a huge investment involved annually, with the market for non-cash business gifts estimated at $125 billion, getting the most positives and fewest negatives is clearly vital.
Well-Packaged, Personal & Memorable Score Best
Return-on-investment for a business gift to high-value targets, such as C-suite executives, is highest if the gift tells a story and facilitates a deeper personal connection, per the survey. Quality is more important than the quantity spent to achieve that personal connection; the survey finds that the right amount to spend per gift is between $50 to $150. What defines quality? The best impression comes from good presentation/packaging and the kind of personalization that logo items and gift cards lack, per gift recipients. A memorable gift will seem selected just for the recipient; will include a personal message and will have “value attributes,” such as a handmade/artisan item or a gift supporting an appropriate cause, such as ecological sustainability or made-in-U.S.A.
A Fail-Safe Business Gifting Checklist
Based on 1,000 business gift recipients’ responses, here is the survey’s checklist for fail-safe business gifting:
- Give a useful item, something practical and that everyone can use.
- Surround the useful item with shareable items, such as gourmet food in line with the gift theme. Stress quality over quantity.
- Aim for a “value attribute,” such as made-in-the-U.S. items. Specific causes might be polarizing but “Made in USA” is universally favored as a top value attribute.
- Spend between $50-$150. Spend for junior-level business partners in the $50-$65 range and for most clients and manager/director-level associates in the $75-$100 range. Spend up to $140-$160 for C-suite execs, VPs and most valued clients.
- Always include a personally addressed note with the gift!
Get more details from the Knack study on corporate gifting.
Make Sure You Have a 2019 Data Hygiene Plan
As marketers prepare to launch their 2019 campaigns, they should make sure that a complementary data hygiene plan is in place, and certainly AccuList USA data services stand ready to aid in ensuring the quality, up-to-date, enriched data essential for achieving marketing results.
Why Does Clean Data Matter?
Marketers don’t want to join the 88% of U.S. companies whose bottom lines are hurt by dirty data, based on Experian research. The top areas impacted by poor data practices are marketing (66% of companies) and lead generation (80% of companies), according to DemandGen. Dirty data leads to poor targeting and ROI for marketers, reduced revenue from customer acquisition and retention, wasted company resources and misdirected strategy. To avoid that fate, marketers need a plan to regularly fix any customer and prospect data that is incorrect, inaccurate, incomplete, incorrectly formatted, duplicated, or irrelevant, plus to enrich the database via appending of relevant but missing customer parameters.
Developing a Data Cleansing Strategy
Pete Thompson, founder of DataIsBeauty.com, has put together a useful primer for developing a data hygiene plan. Start with the basics: Decide what data is important for business decisions and estimate the ROI of data quality improvement. Then review existing data processes: types of data captured, where it comes from and how is it captured, the standards for data quality, how errors and issues are detected and resolved, etc. Other questions include the main sources of errors, methods for validating and standardizing data, methods for appending or combining multiple sources, automation used if any, accountability for data quality, and measurement of data ROI.
Key Elements of a Data Hygiene Plan
Without going into detail, the basic steps of the data plan will start with creating uniform data standards, preferably applied at the point of data capture. Then develop a data validation process, applied either when data is captured or, if that is not possible, at regular intervals for data already entered. After data has been standardized and validated, you can append missing fields by cross referencing with multiple data sources. Streamline the process through automation tools and scripts, saving time and money and reducing human errors. However, while it may be tempting to start with automation, Thompson cautions against putting the cart before the horse; success requires having data standards and a proven validation process in place before automating. And then set up a monitoring system of the hygiene process, whether automated or not, via random test samples and back testing, and implement periodic checks.
For regular monitoring, or overall scrubbing without an automated regimen, experts suggest a quarterly hygiene review for databases of 100,000 records or more, and semi-annual cleaning for smaller databases. Based on our own years in the data business, we think the best advice from Thompson and other experts is to enlist the services of data processing pros when hygiene is due!
Check out more details from Thompson’s data hygiene plan.
2019 Marketing Creative: Simple, Bold, Interactive Design
A new year brings new marketing creative inspirations for AccuList USA’s direct marketing clients, for both digital and printed promotions. Some interesting trends are shaping up, per graphics and ad agency experts.
Simplified Design, Bold Colors & Retro Vibes Win in 2019
The Ballantine and Brand Shouter agencies and the Digital Agency Network suggest some key digital creative trends to embrace this year, many of which can also be applied to direct mail and print advertising. This year, expect more clean, minimalist designs and less use of borders, bars and boxes to separate elements, all say. At the same time, minimalist doesn’t mean drab; more designers are forecast to embrace bright colors and bold color transitions and gradients with black or white text. And speaking of type, Brand Shouter foresees more beautiful, complimentary, brand-consistent typography as well, especially since marketers are shifting toward more text-only designs, while DAN forecasts more use of multicolored vector fonts. Plus, thanks to print technology advances, metallics will rise in popularity to pop in simplified designs, per DAN. Meanwhile, the minimalist flat look, which works well in mobile presentations, also can be livened with the inclusion of 3D elements, as Apple is doing, notes Brand Shouter. And since everything old is new again at some point, several retro trends are forecast. DAN sees use of the bold duotone graphics of the 1970s as well as vintage fonts and motifs, while Ballantine thinks the bright colors and funky designs of the 1990s and early 2000s, which remind many of today’s designers and target buyers of childhood, will reappear to leverage nostalgia. Finally, hand-drawn illustrations will be used to create that feeling of originality and authenticity, predicts DAN.
Story-telling, Video and Mobile Will Be Ubiquitous
Ballantine underscores three ubiquitous trends for creative this year. Video will only continue its impact in marketing, especially in social media, now that 54% of Internet users watch social media videos at least monthly and 65% of ad impressions on Instagram come from video ads, making video a necessary part of most creative budgets. Story-telling over selling is another general trend, especially in social media advertising, where story ads are designed to reflect a platform’s personal user experience rather than slick promotion, mimicking a post from a friend. Finally, marketing design must cater to mobile users now that 57% of online searches originate on mobile devices, almost 50% of web page views worldwide occur on mobile devices, and 95% of Americans own a cellphone and 57% own a smartphone. Any creative that is not mobile-optimized is sacrificing a huge market.
Watch for Interactivity and Diversity to Break New Ground
A Marketing Week article goes beyond colors, fonts and platforms to highlight other underlying trends likely to impact 2019 creative. For example, the rise of voice-enabled technology creates a push for sonic branding to complement visual creative across platforms, channels and media. Look for brands to begin to weave sound into interactive video, chatbots and voice recognition software. Visa, for example, spent a year working on a signature “chime,” heard whenever customers pay through their phones, to evoke a sense of security and efficiency. Meanwhile, the growing demand for diversity within organizations and their outreach to customers will push marketing creative beyond stock photos of diverse employees or graphics of multicolored hands, suggests Marketing Week. In fact, businesses can use creative development as a non-confrontational, thought-provoking, story-led effort to honestly address concerns. For example, multinational food services and facilities management firm Sodexo launched a campaign supporting its disability inclusion commitment with new creative that presented people as tennis coaches, parents and musicians, rather than focusing on their disabilities.
Check out this useful infographic that includes many of these marketing design predictions at https://venngage.com/blog/graphic-design-trends/
