Digital Gifts: The New Customer Engagement Idea For Marketers

Digital Marketers are facing a frustrating dilemma – they have numerous ways to reach and engage with customers – from email to social media to mobile apps. But the sheer volume of information on these channels is drowning out marketers’ offers and causing poor response rates.

Adam Hutchinson, Marketing Manager at Socedo, a social media management company, faced such a dilemma with his webinar program. He was receiving positive feedback about the content of his webinars, but he was wondering how he could persuade more customers to attend the webinars and continue engaging with Socedo after the webinar was over.

For the next webinar, Adam tried a new idea to cut through the inboxes – he offered attendees a cup of coffee while they tuned in for the webinar.

“Sign-ups were through the roof! We more than doubled webinar registrations and increased attendance by 30 percent,” Adam found.

Adam used Rybbon to send gourmet coffee e-gift cards to webinar attendees. The gifts arrived in well-crafted emails from Socedo. Rybbon even notified Socedo’s marketing platform when attendees claimed their gift so that Adam could continue to build customer engagement with another piece of content or a phone call.

Launched in 2015, Rybbon’s digital gifting technology is helping today’s marketers win the constant battle to cut through the noise and get customers to pay attention. Rybbon provides marketers a complete solution for buying, sending and tracking digital gifts. Through the Rybbon store, marketers buy gifts from top US and international brands like Amazon, Hulu and Visa. Marketers can then send the gifts with customized emails and gifting pages made right through the Rybbon platform.

Rybbon can be utilized whenever companies need to provide an incentive, a reward or just a nice thank you to their customers. Popular uses have included referral programs, surveys, customer advocacy and holiday campaigns. And new uses are emerging as marketers get creative with the automation and instant gratification capabilities of digital gifting.

“We decided to expand our use to other aspects of marketing. We included a gift in our end-of-month email blast to engaged leads and had double the conversion rate on new sign ups,” says Adam. “This was based off of the same open rate! Using Rybbon has a lower cost-per-lead than paid search or sponsored content. What a positive experience and well worth the cost of a coffee gift card.”

Rybbon has also partnered with Marketo, a leading provider of marketing software and solutions, to enable marketers to send digital gifts directly via the marketing automation platform. This allows marketers to use Marketo’s customer segmentation, email templates and campaign flows.

“Marketers today are building long-term customer relationships that advance a conversation over time. To do this, they need innovative solutions that help them engage customers and prospects in a relevant and personalized way,” said Lou Pelosi, senior director of LaunchPoint partner eco-system at Marketo. “We’re excited to have Rybbon join LaunchPoint. The integration of their solution with Marketo’s Engagement Marketing Platform empowers marketers with a new way to build these meaningful relationships.”

More than 25 customers have already signed up and started sending gifts since Rybbon was launched in May 2015. It turns out that appreciation and gratitude are the edge Marketers need to cut through the noise and connect and engage with their customers.

Read more about the Socedo case study .

about the author

Brenda Stoltz

Brenda has over 20 years of experience building, selling and marketing products for F100 and start-ups.

Brenda has over 20 years of experience building, selling and marketing products for F100 and start-ups.