It’s no wonder there was an 80% increase in global searches for “online gift” in 2020 compared to 2019.
While gifting in person will never stop, what this time in our lives has shown us is that virtual gifting can be a really nice experience — and a lucrative one for eCommerce brands (more on this later).

But what we’ve seen is very few brands are getting their online gifting experience right. Why is that?

We see three common challenges:

1. The operational elements involved in providing a good gifting experience are too manual and demanding.
It’s almost impossible to do if the brand is using a third party logistics provider (3PL) — because it’s so systemised and clunky.

Even if you manage to find a way to bridge this gap, there’s a technical implementation component required to add this functionality (such as a note attribute), that has to be exported and printed. This still adds hours onto the plates of your warehouse team to execute.

2. Online gifting experiences aren’t providing the same impact as if it was in-person.
There is a bias towards online gifts being lazy because the actual experience of how the gifts are delivered is weak, compared to giving an in-person gift.

For brands that don’t offer any sort of print-out (because they physically can’t on a warehouse level) lose the opportunity to add sentimental value to the gift giving process.

3. The sending of the message and the receiving of the goods are disconnected.
When this happens, you lose the gratification when you get something sent in the post and have no idea who it has come from. Or, you get the message prior to receiving the gift and the element of surprise has gone.

Wouldn’t it be great if you could emulate some of the themes and feelings one would receive by getting an in-person gift? That’s exactly what we’re trying to do with Giftnote.

We’re not talking about the gift itself, it’s the rich media and the content wrapped around the experience of purchasing and receiving the gift.

We figured, if we can allow store owners to offer intelligent, paperless, and automated gift messaging at checkout — that is sent once the parcel is delivered — we could be closer to helping online stores bridge the emotional gap between sending an online gift vs. gifting in-person.

If the experience is better, it makes it more memorable. There is also a positive brand affinity associated with this experience that can be leveraged. What do we mean by this? We’re talking about giftable revenue.

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Giftable revenue is the proportion of your total sales attributable to gifts.

From your Shopify dashboard, you can get your total revenue for the day. Using Giftnote’s Shopify App integration, any order marked as a gift or gift voucher will be tracked against your giftable revenue.

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Knowing your giftable revenue and the data behind it is great for a few reasons:

1. The user isn’t always the buyer: When you’re looking at revenue, you’re only looking at buyers. Yet, when you can track your giftable revenue, it helps you understand the difference between buyer vs user.
   
2. You’ll understand if gifting is worth investing into: Once you understand the nature of your customers and the reasons why they buy from you — you’re able to apply this to your entire business strategy. It could be as simple as a slight tweak of messaging on your website to say that you can buy this as a gift for someone else.
   
3. You’ll uncover which products are most popular for gifting: Use it to inform how you package or market your products. For example, if you had 6 months worth of gifting data and start to notice a trend between particular items always being bought together, why not offer it as a gift bundle or special gift promotion?

Some businesses might still want to offer a handwritten gift card, which is still a really nice touch. But have you considered offering this as a premium addition to your gifting experience?

Dr. Dough Donuts has created thousands of dollars in additional revenue because they are charging a small fee for a handwritten card, versus offering a digital message through Giftnote for free.

Just by adding this freemium version, they’ve been able to decrease the manual work it takes to offer a personalised gift message while making additional revenue at the same time.

Install Giftnote on your Shopify store today. Checkout our app listing

The pandemic has changed the way we approach gift giving. Since many milestones were missed, rescheduled, or cancelled — people turned to online gift giving more than ever to make up for these lost experiences.