Is your brand winning with e-commerce personalisation?

From your customer’s point of view, when they buy a gift, they want it to look as if they care. The problem is, your customers are time poor. They like the convenience of buying gift sets, but, in all honesty, these don’t feel special enough.

This is where personalisation steps up, because even the simplest way to make something unique makes a gift look special. Customers love gift personalisation because it looks like they spent more time choosing it than they actually did. It makes them look good and feel good.

When you offer your customers the opportunity to choose a customised gift over a generic one, you gain an advantage over competitors – it makes your brand stand out in a saturated marketplace.

Personalisation ideas are fun and creative – and can be integrated into the checkout journey as part of your mass gifting contract packing project, or into a promotional marketing campaign.

Examples of gift personalisation

• Personalised wraparound sleeve for the gift pack – like a name or a message
• Personalised labels on boxes and bottles

For Famous Grouse, Granby delivered a promotional marketing fulfilment campaign with a unique packaging element. Customers bought a bottle in store and easily validated their purchase online using Swift Receipt. They could then order for free a bespoke label, which they would receive by mail and apply to the bottle themselves.

Personalisation can make everyday purchases special

The possibilities of personalisation are not restricted to gifts. If you can produce a piece of packaging that’s so cool the customer wants to keep and possibly repurpose, you’re onto a winner.

We recently planned a campaign where customers could order personalised packets of their favourite cereal – along similar lines to the ‘Your Nutella, Your Way’ and Marmite’s personalised jar campaigns. The brand could spend weeks sitting in prime position on someone’s kitchen table.

And how many of these branded gifts end up as pen pots or ornaments? Quite a few. When they do, this type of branded material sticks around in the homes of your loyal customers for a long time. It’s as good as a regular ad spot on TV.

Why e-commerce works best for personalisation

You ideally want to keep personalisation out of a store environment and out it into an e-commerce environment. On-site personalisation – like labels and sleeves – is very popular in the runup to Christmas, Easter, Mother’s Day and Father’s Day.

Unfortunately, its popularity can cause queues that snarl up the store you’re in, frustrating customers who are trying to buy your product – and those who are not. In addition, your brand’s reputation could be put at risk, because in-store events tend not to be subject to rigorous quality standards.

Also, you will be limited in how often you can run these campaigns in a store, and which products you can promote. Deploying your personalisation campaign online is much more efficient. We have found that customers are willing to pay more for it too.

The requirements for personalisation gifting can very easily be integrated into your 3PL fulfilment campaign. A robust e-commerce process is important, so make sure your fulfilment partner can handle it. Personalisation and mass gifting is very sensitive to time – people tend to buy gifts at the last minute. If there are any errors or typos in their order, they won’t feel they have had a good engagement with your brand.

Gift personalisation campaigns checklist

• Create a fun idea that resonates with your customers
• Back this with good processes backed by technology
• Choose e-commerce as your personalisation channel
• Utilise close collaboration with your fulfilment agency

Granby has been helping big brands to create and deliver personalised mass gifting for decades. Speak to us about your ideas today.

Photo by cottonbro from Pexels