BLOG6 min

The power of gifting, in the palm of your hand

How giving our customers more control has become a key ingredient in our secret sauce.

&Open6 min2024-10-10

Deep dive into our categories

The power of gifting, in the palm of your hand

Every day, our Product Team discusses different ways to simplify gifting and make it easier for our customers — and with so many ideas, it’s all about understanding which ones will have the most impact.

When we’re choosing which product improvements to focus on, the first step is to look at the full gifting journey, which covers everything from the moment a customer decides to give a gift, to the moment the recipient receives it, and further into feedback and reporting.

After extensive internal research and conversations with teams across the company, we realized we were doing things at each stage of the gifting journey that we could instead empower customers to do themselves — ultimately giving them more control and saving them time.

The result? Three powerful gifting solutions that have helped our users gift bigger and better than ever before…

Our self-serve Gift Catalog

Our self-serve Gift Catalog

Designing a gift catalog with its own real-time branding tool is no mean feat, but we knew a user-friendly, DIY approach to ordering custom gifts would be a real timesaver for our customers.

Simply pick a product, choose the quantity, upload your design and position the artwork as you’d like — it’s that simple, and can reduce the order time from days to mere minutes.

With hundreds of gifts and customization options including screen printing, embroidery and engraving, we’re very proud of what we’ve created and know it will keep getting better and better.

Custom themes

Custom themes

Gifts work best when they feel relevant and personal, but that can be hard to do at scale. We had already been creating custom themes to add context to the gift redemption experience, using brand messaging, colors and logos to make every step feel special.

We decided to create a customer-facing version of this branding tool, giving our users control over their themes and allowing them to align their gifting with everything from ad-hoc rewards to large events with their own branded identities.

Our favorite part of this was adding in the ability to send a personal video message with your gift invitation. It’s a game-changer for so many use cases, whether it’s a manager congratulating their team or an individual giving more detail on why they’re excited to give this particular gift.

Automated campaigns

Automated campaigns

Sometimes a gift selection is perfect for a specific use case, and you find yourself sending it again and again. Putting together groups of gifts, to make it easier for our customers to find and send easily, was a manual task that we found was diverting too much of our resources.

The solution? A campaign management tool that solved a number of problems for us: customers could create recurring gift invitations with custom gift selections, and save these campaigns to their homepage for easy access.

The key feature here was our ability to integrate these campaigns with the HR and CRM tools our customers already use, so their gifting could be triggered by pre existing data like birthdays. We reduced the lift on our team, but also made it easier for our users to gift with purpose.

Giving our users direct access to the most powerful and effective gifting tools will always be a core focus for us, and we look forward to continuing this work, implementing thoughtful and considered updates that make gifting faster and easier than ever. Watch this space…

Want to receive the latest &Open updates, news and occasional gift? You can unsubscribe at any time.

Related Post

BLOG8 min

A note from our founders

Reflections on the past, foundations for the future.

G2 Users Love Us
B Corp

Product