6 Digital Gifting Campaigns for Driving Conversions at Scale
Digital gifting is an effective strategy for increasing both customer acquisition and loyalty. According to a recent Forbes study, customers who are gifted are 43% more likely to remain with a brand and spend more in the long run. The study also found that nearly 50% of companies experience significant advantages from their gifting programs.
The most notable benefit? Creating a sense of value for recipients.
In this guide, we'll break down how to create an effective gifting strategy and a few examples of digital gifting campaign ideas that can drive conversions.
What is digital gifting?
As the term indicates, digital gifting refers to the process of sending and receiving gifts virtually, eliminating the need for physical delivery. It typically involves digital gift cards, e-vouchers, prepaid codes, or experiential rewards that can be redeemed online or in-store.
Digital gifting is widely used for corporate gifting, employee recognition, and personal gifting due to its convenience, instant delivery, and flexibility. Digital gifting may be used for self-use gifts or for gifting to other individuals or organizations.
Why is digital gifting making waves across the marketing world?
Digital gifting is rapidly gaining popularity among businesses and individuals as a cost-effective and meaningful way to express appreciation. Whether for customers, employees, channel partners, or business partners, digital gifts offer a seamless, personalized experience that strengthens relationships and enhances engagement.
According to industry data from the National Retail Federation (NRF), digital gift card sales have experienced a significant surge, with an annual growth rate of 200 percent over the past five years.
One of the key benefits of digital gifting is its convenience. It eliminates logistical challenges, reduces costs associated with physical gifts, and allows recipients to redeem rewards instantly.
It also enhances security, prevents loss or theft, and provides businesses with valuable insights into customer and employee preferences.
6 Digital gifting campaign ideas for driving conversions at scale
Drive conversions with creative digital gifting campaigns. Here are six impactful ideas to scale your gifting strategy and maximize results:
1. Elevate your marketing events
At a time when organizations are moving towards digital events in place of physical ones, differentiating your event becomes critical to ensure that it stands out, draws the right audience, and brings in the kind of registrants who actually attend the event.
This is where digital gifting comes in. Offering a gift for attending or even staying until the end of an event can considerably incentivize these actions. Another approach here is to use digital gifting to add a promotional hook to your strategy by offering gifts to the first ‘x’ number of individuals who register or attend the event.
You can also send virtual stickers to registrants that they can use to pin to their profiles during the event to increase the sense of community that arises through the event's course.
2. Promote content consumption and engagement
Digital marketing likely forms a big part of your overall marketing strategy, and many of your customers engage with it. Content can be a powerful tool to engender trust in your brand among your prospects and customers.
By integrating digital gifting into your content strategy, you can create an enticing reason for potential readers to engage with your materials. Offer a small reward—such as an e-gift card, exclusive discount, or entry into a giveaway—for downloading or viewing an ebook, whitepaper, or industry report. This approach not only encourages content consumption but also keeps your brand top-of-mind for weeks to come.
3. For contributing to a UGC Campaign
User-generated content is a valuable asset for B2B marketers and one that B2B organizations are keen to tap into. 68% percent of survey respondents indicated that they trust consumer opinions posted online.
Photos, reviews, quotes, testimonials, suggestions, customer tips, and more from existing customers can all be used to help attract tomorrow’s customers. Collectively, they make your marketing campaigns more authentic and compelling. Digital gifting can be an excellent tool to encourage your users to participate in a drive to source user-generated content or UGC.
Imagine you’re gearing up for a major campaign launch. With digital gifting, you can gather genuine customer feedback while offering a thoughtful incentive that encourages participation without skewing the results.
Leverage Plum, our corporate gifting platform, to seamlessly integrate engagement into the gifting experience by prompting users to provide feedback or schedule a live discussion as part of the gift redemption process, ensuring valuable insights while delivering meaningful rewards.
4. Revamp your lead nurturing strategy
Many marketing and sales efforts are wasted on outdated leads with little to no engagement. However, by enriching prospect data and qualifying leads, you can re-engage them.
Improving the engagement rate is their key goal for emails. It’s important to examine the current sales cadences and tailor them to show their value — either in your product or your content. These automation campaigns can build trust and strengthen relationships, but you must fine-tune them to the audience and their needs.
Consider adding a gift to your lead nurturing strategy as a great way to improve engagement rates and have your marketing qualified leads (MQLs) turn into sales qualified leads (SQLs).
Beyond conversions, digital gifts can go a long way when it comes to encouraging advocacy, promoting retention, or simply rewarding a user for a long-term subscription to your newsletter.
Let’s say you have a list of MQLs who previously engaged with your brand—perhaps they downloaded an eBook or attended a webinar—but have since gone silent. Instead of letting these prospects slip away, a well-timed digital gift can be the perfect re-engagement strategy.
With Plum, you can integrate digital gifting into your lead nurturing campaigns by offering an incentive in exchange for a small action—whether it’s responding to an email, filling out a survey, or booking a demo call. For example, sending an email with “We’d love to reconnect! Enjoy a coffee on us” along with a $5 Starbucks gift card can spark interest and bring cold leads back into your pipeline.
Beyond conversions, digital gifts can also be used to reward newsletter subscribers, encourage referrals, or strengthen relationships with long-time clients, making every interaction feel more personalized and valuable.
5. For podcast listeners
Leverage your in-house podcast as a powerful lead-generation tool by integrating digital gifting into your episodes. Invite a guest speaker to share insights, then engage your audience by offering an exclusive gift—but with a twist.
Provide listeners with a unique password during the episode, which they can use on a landing page to redeem their gift by entering their email ID. This not only incentivizes engagement but also helps you capture high-intent leads for your email marketing program.
Turn passive listeners into engaged leads and potential customers while strengthening your brand presence with a creative digital gifting campaign!
6. Celebrating company milestones and achievements
Company milestones are powerful marketing moments—use them to re-engage clients, strengthen loyalty, and drive conversions. Whether it's a funding announcement, customer retention milestone, or exceeding revenue targets, a well-executed digital gifting campaign can turn your success into a shared celebration.
A strategic digital gifting campaign paired with handwritten notes of gratitude can transform milestone celebrations into high-impact engagement opportunities. Consider rewarding your valuable clients with exclusive digital gift cards. You can also try nurturing cold leads.
Elevate your company culture and drive conversions by turning celebrations into opportunities for deeper engagement and advocacy!
Attributes of a successful digital gifting campaigns
What makes digital gifting tick? As a marketer, what do you need to do to ensure the success of your e-gifting program? Here are three key aspects to keep in mind for a successful digital gifting campaign.
1. High discoverability
Ensure your digital gift card campaigns are easily discoverable by optimizing them for desktop and mobile experiences. In addition, prioritize the gifting experience when designing your marketing campaign and take care that you use the right distribution channels to reach your target audience accurately.
2. Personalize the gifting experience
Quando progettate la parte acquirente della vostra campagna di digital gifting, inserite funzionalità di personalizzazione, rapidità di consegna, opzioni di consegna multiple e una scelta di opzioni/denominazioni di valuta.
Include the recipient's name and a personalized message with every reward. Companies that customize their gifting programs see 35% higher engagement rates than those sending generic rewards.
3. A hassle-free & immediate recipient experience
Remember that you’re not dealing with a purchase here but a present! Recipients should be able to claim their reward in under a minute. According to a Salesforce survey, customers cite automatically applied rewards as one of their top motivators for loyalty program participation.
Also ensure essential capabilities such as mobile app support with clear messaging to enable campaign success.
4. Well-defined objectives & metrics
Before launching your campaign, define your objectives clearly. Random gifting can waste resources and dilute impact. Every gift should be tied to a specific business objective and target audience. Be sure to document your gifting triggers, the metrics you’ll use to gauge success, and the outcomes you expect before proceeding with the campaign.
5. Track and measure results
Keep track of essential performance indicators such as redemption rates, customer retention, and ROI for each campaign. This data can help optimize future programs and justify continued investment in gifting strategies.
Digital gifting in action: How Xero saw an uptick of 25% conversion rates
Xero, a leading cloud-based accounting solutions provider, sought to accelerate customer growth by tapping into the power of referrals. To achieve this, they introduced a digital gift card incentive program designed to reward customers for sharing their positive experiences.
The Challenge
Facing stiff competition in the SaaS landscape, Xero needed a cost-effective and engaging way to leverage its loyal customer base. Traditional referral rewards had shown limited appeal, and the company was keen to introduce a solution that provided immediate, tangible benefits to both referrers and new customers.
Solution provided by Xoxoday Plum
Xero partnered with Xoxoday Plum to launch a streamlined digital gifting campaign. Under this program, Xero implemented Plum’s robust and unified reward platform, leveraging features like Plum global reward marketplace and its link-based rewarding technology.
The reward marketplace offered a diverse portfolio of 21,000+ rewards choices across 100+ countries, while the link-based rewarding allowed Xero to automate the distribution of rewards through personalized reward links.
Outstanding results
The digital gift card referral program drove a marked increase in customer referrals and conversion rates. They drastically lowered their customer acquisition cost (CAC) from this campaign and saw a 25% increase in their conversion rate.
Conclusione
Xero’s digital gift card referral program successfully boosted customer referrals and acquisitions. By using Xoxoday Plum’s easy-to-implement platform, Xero rewarded both referrers and new customers with personalized digital gift cards.
Ready to harness the power of digital rewards and turn your customers into your brand ambassadors? Try Plum today!