Anyone who runs an ecommerce brand is all too familiar with the firehose of tips, tricks, hacks, and tactics you must do right now to succeed. From Google search results to LinkedIn feeds to podcasts and blogs — there are more strategies out there than you could ever implement in the lifetime of a brand.
Instead of wading through oceans of how-tos and Ultimate Guides to Do X, there’s really only one source you should listen to: your customer.
Your unique customers buying your unique stuff have the only opinions that matter, and making a plan that improves those opinions should be your primary goal. After all, do you really need much more than a heap of happy customers to thrive?
These are people who will spend more money with you, come back and shop again with you, and tell all their pals (and probably even a few strangers) all about your shop so even more folks swing by your dot-com and scroll through your digital shelves.
It’s true. Making people happy and getting ahead in ecommerce boils down to the customer experience. From the first time they find out about your store to the final tracking status update after they purchase, shoppers expect a Grade A, super seamless, highly personalized experience.
And while you may have the journey down pat for people shopping for themselves, it’s crucial to not overlook the details when it comes to your growing cohort of one-to-many customers buying gifts from your brand.
If you’re ahead of the curve and have already adopted a modern gifting tool for your DTC and corporate shoppers, here’s how you can ensure your post-gifting experience keeps people coming back for more and fuels your gifting channel flywheel.
The Rise of Online Gifting and a Resurrected Customer Experience
If you think people are picking your brand because of your unique goods, you’re not getting the full picture. Of course, your company makes an awesome product, but a massive 80% of shoppers say that a brand’s customer experience (CX) is just as important as its products or services.
When your typical consumer has thousands of competing options at their fingertips, other factors like your branding, service, and overall experience are what push people to the checkout.
The typical direct-to-consumer (DTC) shopping experience has been optimized to the brink. Every successful ecommerce brand has optimized the stuff customers can see — product images, site nav, Meta ads, checkout flow — and all the stuff they can’t — SEO, site speed, mobile-friendliness, and more.
According to Shopify, a rock-solid customer experience strategy encompasses all of this:
- It creates a consistent omnichannel experience. Your customers should have the same experience across your brand no matter where they shop.
- It customizes interactions across digital touchpoints so customers have a positive and personal experience whenever they interact with your brand.
- It allows customers to seamlessly navigate your online channels and easily find and purchase your products.
Holding that list of must-haves against your own digital CX most likely looks pretty good. You’ve mastered TikTok Shop, your shoppers get VIP deals and early access to goods in their personal account with your store, and checking out takes 30 seconds. They truly have it all…
…unless they’re trying to buy a bunch of gifts.
Gifting is growing (and it’s time to consider that CX).
Today, nearly one in five dollars spent in retail happens online. Ecommerce is eating up more and more of the retail pie each year, and that’s growth driven by how consumers have expanded what they purchase online.
Categories like clothing and electronics have always been top ecommerce buys. As people have grown more accustomed to online shopping, it’s now normal behavior to head to the internet to buy big-ticket items like furniture and vehicles, or smaller everyday goods like food and beverages.
Another category on the rise? Gifts.
Buying presents, particularly gift cards, isn’t a novel ecommerce purchase. Online corporate gifting has been around since the dawn of ecommerce. However, when the coronavirus pandemic impacted consumers in 2020, the growth of online gifting was thrust into hyper-speed.
In-person shopping was limited, but the desire to connect with and celebrate each other was stronger than ever. Shoppers had no choice but to head online to meet their needs.
From 2019 to 2020, Google searches for “online gift” shot up 80% as people sought to celebrate loved ones, friends, and coworkers from a distance, and it’s trend that has persisted since then.
Today, online gifting has become as normalized as shopping for a new t-shirt for yourself. During the 2024 holiday season, the number of people who planned to shop for gifts exclusively online was up 24% over 2023, and roughly half of shoppers planned to wrap up their holiday gifting from the comfort of the internet.
The global gifting market is expected to crush $8 trillion by 2027, and the US corporate gifting market is fatter than $300 billion all on its own.
That’s a lot of folks flooding the ecommerce gates to get their gifting on.
The downside? The online gifting experience has historically been an afterthought from checkout to post-purchase and beyond.
Customer Experience Pitfalls of Online Gifting.
Trying to buy a lot of products to send as gifts to a lot of different people can be a nightmare — but it’s not the brand’s fault.
Ecommerce platforms and apps are forward-thinking tools and have been built to help brands build better, more efficient shopping journeys that lead to increased conversion rates, order values, and customer loyalty. However, they’re built with people who are shopping for themselves in mind.
For everyone else, brands have few resources to try and create a streamlined gift-buying experience to attract and convert these high-value customers. Despite best efforts, the CX of online gifting has fallen short of modern consumer standards.
Let’s look at the typical online gifting experience through a few different journeys.
Journey 1: One person buying a gift for one other person.
This experience is not that far removed from the classic online purchase journey. This customer needs just a single address for their recipient, and they can manage the purchase by going through the checkout just once.
CX Pitfalls:
- Requires the gifter to know the best shipping address for their recipient as there’s no digital option, e.g., link, email, or text delivery.
- Is error-prone due to common checkout autofills, replacing the recipient address with the buyer’s address.
- Pricing will most likely be exposed on the packing slip within the package.
- Rarely accommodates a gift note or other thoughtful touch.
Journey 2: One person buys gifts for many people.
This experience is also akin to the personal shopping journey. This gifter shops a brand’s standard DTC website and adds a gift to their cart. However, they need to send this gift to multiple people, not just one.
CX Pitfalls:
- All of the pitfalls of the 1:1 gifting experience from Journey 1.
- Requires the gifter to go through the checkout one time per recipient. Depending on the size of their recipient list, this could require a significant amount of time.
- Will potentially receive shipping and tracking updates for every single order, clogging up their inbox.
Journey 3: One person buying gifts for their corporation.
Corporate gifting, or business gifting, is a huge market and growing rapidly in the US. These B2B gifters are often charged with buying gifts for employees either in bulk, for events like the in-office holiday party, or one at a time, for more sporadic events like anniversaries or new hires.
CX Pitfalls:
- All of the pitfalls from Journeys 1 and 2 if they prefer a self-service experience.
- If they want to add any customization like logos or gift notes, they need to contact the company directly via phone, email, or form.
- This process often requires significant planning and lead time, creating friction and turning away gifters who miss a deadline.
The Common Thread of Corporate Gifting
What do all of these journeys have in common? These journeys are rife with friction. They require multiple checkout transactions or shuffling through product catalogs or dealing with a purchase journey unlike every other online purchase journey. And on top of it all, this unique (and highly lucrative) relationship goes essentially unacknowledged.
There is no post-purchase experience for gifters and recipients.
There’s no thank you email, no outreach to recipients, no re-engagement beyond the gifting moment itself — and that is a massively missed opportunity.
Why Your Gifting Channel Needs a Post-purchase Experience
Leading email marketing platform Klaviyo has been the busy hub for a bajillion emails sent (ok, maybe not a bajillion, but Very Many emails). One of the most impactful marketing sequences a brand can run happens after the checkout.
According to their research, post-purchase messaging blows your average email campaign out of the water:
- 217% higher open rate
- 500% higher click rate
- 90% higher revenue per recipient
Not to mention that reaching out to recipients may be one of your smartest moves. After all, this is an audience who someone they know (aka a trusted source) has just given your product and has already integrated your goods into their life. They are as hot as a lead can get, and one tiny email may be just the nudge they need to become your best customer.
In a nutshell, you can leverage Zest to bring your gifting experience up to snuff, but if you want to grow your brand even more through gifting, you need to set up some post-purchase comms for every gift sent.
Using Klaviyo and Zest to Power Gift Channel Growth
When using Zest, both the person sending the gift and the person receiving the gift can opt into your marketing. This opens up practically endless opportunities to reach out to both audiences with messaging that relates to their unique behavior with your store.
Of course, you can push these audiences into your existing DTC email marketing sequences, but as with everything in ecommerce, a bit of personalization goes a long way. Acknowledging, rewarding, and encouraging gifting with this group could lead to many, many more high-dollar gift orders.
When you plug Klaviyo into your Zest account, you can:
- Celebrate first-time gifters.
- Reward gifters who’ve spent a certain amount on gifts with their own gift or discount.
- Create a gifter loyalty program.
- Introduce your brand and welcome first-time gift recipients.
- Encourage gift recipients to shop at your store with a coupon.
- Surprise and delight top gifters with some swag.
TL;DR Treat your post-gifting experience how you treat your DTC post-purchase experience: Optimize the f*ck out of it.
Hot Tips for Hotter Gifting
- A little personalization makes a big impact! Klaviyo has a healthy stock of personalization variables that can help your emails feel more thoughtful, helpful, and supportive.
- Send gifting reminders around holidays and events. It’s no question that many people send gifts around holidays and annual occasions, such as Christmas, Valentine’s Day, graduation season. Consider creating flows that remind your customers about these gifting occasions and how Zest makes it easy to send your goods as gifts!
- Test, optimize, and repeat. As with any part of your business, it’s a good idea to set strategies and make decisions based on all the data you can muster. Try adding A/B tests to these flows to test different email lengths, CTAs, or offers!
Zest, Klaviyo, and a Whole Lot of Online Gifts
Keeping customers happy is a simple concept that requires a lot of thoughtfulness. Putting their every interaction with your brand under the microscope may seem like a complex chore, but understanding the ins and outs of how customers get to your checkout is crucial to keeping them around.
The difference between a “meh” customer experience and a memorable one that stokes conversion and loyalty is how the latter never stops evolving. Ecommerce brands thrive when they stay dynamic — meeting the near-constant progression of how, why, when, and where their customers are shopping.
As consumers lean more and more on ecommerce for gifting, now is the time to pay attention and plan ahead with an experience that meets their needs. With the right tools like Zest and Klaviyo, your best-in-class DTC experience is easily extended to your online gifting experience (and your shoppers will definitely notice).
When it comes to gifting, do you think people are more likely to choose the friction-filled path of forms and phone calls and multiple transactions or the gifts that are as easy to buy as something for themselves?
Leave the hurdles of online gifting in the past. Hop into the future, give your shoppers a premium gift-buying journey while they shop and post-purchase, and watch your gift channel become a seriously hot channel for your bottom line.
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