Top5 Ways to use Giftogram

On this episode of Top5, Tara Thurber chats with Brian Duran, VP of Sales & Marketing for Giftogram. They discuss how to simplify your organizations' gifting program by offering employees and clients the opportunity to choose their favorite eGift Card.

With a decade of experience, Brian is a leader in digital promotions with a proven track record as a problem solver for logistical challenges.

Tune in to hear how Giftogram offers over 200 options, designs for every occasion, personalization and security.

#Podcast #Podcasts #Podcasting #PodcastShow #PodcastSeries #PodcastEpisode #PodcastInterview

Transcript

Tara Thurber: 0:05

Welcome back to Top5 brought to you by to DefinedTalent at DefinedLogic service. We are a results driven service working with clients to connect them with quality talent as well as working to make an impact within the recruiting industry. We talk straight about today's professional world with real world professionals, experts in recruitment, job seekers and business owners alike. Have a question for us. Send it in and you might spur our next conversation. I'm Tara Thurber, Director of Talent Innovation. And joining me today to discuss Top5 Ways To Use Giftogram is the one and only swiss army knife. Brian Duran. Hey, Brian, how are you today?

Brian Duran: 0:45

Hello, how are ya?

Tara Thurber: 0:47

Good. Thank you for joining us.

Brian Duran: 0:49

Of course. Thanks for having me.

Tara Thurber: 0:51

Absolutely. So I got to say right out of the gate. What does it mean to be a swiss army knife of Giftogram ?

Brian Duran: 1:00

It's a it's a funny job title. It kind of came about a few years ago, we were at a trade show. And we realized that like I've basically done every role in the company. I've been with the company for 10 years Giftogram came about about six years ago. So anything related to Giftogram, you name it, I was a part of my main job, like function is oiling the machine. So it doesn't matter what department it is. I might not be the expert in that department. But I can help bring out bring out the expertise and everyone in those departments. So whether it's production, sales, whatever it may be, I might not be the best sales guy there. But I know how to get everyone to get to the point where they are the best salesperson.

Tara Thurber: 1:43

That's awesome. I like that I like that profile in the background of of what it means to be a swiss army knife, right?

Brian Duran: 1:51

Yeah, not a traditional job. But it works for me.

Tara Thurber: 1:54

Yeah, yeah, I love it. So what exactly is Giftogram?

Brian Duran: 2:00

So Giftogram is a self serve platform that allows users to send gifts to their employees or customers. It's pretty self sufficient, you just kind of create an account, and you can start gifting online, you'll be set up an account manager right away, whether you need them or not, you'll at least have someone that you can call right away. If you need any help with your gifting. It's only for businesses. So it's a B2B service, very popular around the holidays, especially for holiday gifting. But it can be used for so many things. That could be like customer incentives, employee gifts, Spot rewards, all sorts of things. I've seen a lot of really interesting use cases for Giftogram.

Tara Thurber: 2:36

Awesome. Yeah, looking at Giftogram and just kind of chatting with you about it, it seems like it would be it seems pretty simple to use. And with the holidays coming and you know, the talk of things not being delivered on time, or even just the busyness that companies are having right now. Getting to the end of the year, and on top of trying to make sure they get their gifts out to whether it's for their clients or for their internal employees. It just seems like it would be a big huge problem solver on all fronts.

Brian Duran: 3:13

Yeah, I'm sure you're seeing those news headlines where cargo ships are stuck at sea. freight trucks are getting stuck somewhere, all sorts of things. I actually had a client who is from California and sent me a video of all the ships out at sea. And she's like, I've never seen ships this far south and California.

Tara Thurber: 3:30

Wow.

Brian Duran: 3:31

Like those are all the products you're never going to receive. But you'll definitely receive ours.

Tara Thurber: 3:35

Oh, man. And it's so simple. I mean, I got a beautiful email from you the other day with a nice little Giftogram that I cannot wait to use. So and thank you so much for that.

Brian Duran: 3:48

You're welcome.

Tara Thurber: 3:49

I love the fact to talk to me on how somebody can kind of utilize Giftogram, I mean is it they go online, I guess go through the process a little bit.

Brian Duran: 4:00

So on the recipient side of things that you receive a Giftogram, give him a little weird to explain. We always say it's a gift card for gift cards, right because a gift for a Giftogram is just a code in an email. But that code is unlocks 200 different retailers that the recipient can choose from. So you don't have to figure out you know it is so and so like Nike to sell into like Amazon, they get to choose their own gift card. So say you give somebody$25 gift card, they don't have to spend it all in one place either. So they can do $15 at Starbucks and the rest at Target. There's a lot more flexibility in there. So it really becomes the Gift of Choice the recipient is getting to choose their own gift.

Tara Thurber: 4:44

That's fantastic. So let's kind of I'd love if you wouldn't mind just sharing some of the top ways the top your top five ways and ideas of really utilizing Giftogram specifically for the holiday season but we can use it all year round. So you Let's kind of dive in on on those ways.

Brian Duran: 5:03

Alright. So number one for me is customer incentives, you can encourage all sorts of actions or feedback from clients. I don't think people realize how much of that's already happening. Yes, it's getting cold out, you want to get a jacket, you go online, you find a website they want to buy from, and the first thing that pops up is 10%. Off, if you add your email, that's an incentive, all these companies are doing it. The other day, my wife and I got new phones. And there was some sort of rebate, and we got the rebate in the mail. And guess what he was a gift card. And I say this, because a lot of major companies already figured this out, they realize you can use gift cards as incentives to incentivize customers to do certain things, maybe close a sale, or get more feedback from them. Yeah, giftogram really helps you do that. In the same scale, or a smaller scale, you know, you don't have to be a multi-million dollar company, you can be a company of five people, one person 50 people, you can use Giftogram to incentivize your clients and your customers to do anything.

Tara Thurber: 6:04

That's really fantastic. And it is just sent instantly in an email. So it's not even like it takes a lot of time on the backend either.

Brian Duran: 6:14

Exactly. There's a lot of instant feedback. So you know, say, say you had a customer fill out a survey, once you receive that feedback from that survey, you can get on the Giftogram and just send that right away. So there is no wait period, you know, they didn't forget about it. You know, I've seen a lot of programs kind of run like this for like a month later, their reward sentence like you've lost your traction. With this, you can really, you know, we're in the world of instant gratification. Everyone's on their phones, everyone needs something right away. So get the grant plays right into that.

Tara Thurber: 6:46

Awesome, does it ever expire?

Brian Duran: 6:49

So the giftagram itself, the reward code expires after 12 months. But once they select their gift card, as long as that retailer exists, that never expires. I'm assuming Amazon's not going anywhere.

Tara Thurber: 7:01

Yeah.

Brian Duran: 7:04

And we really stick with a lot of the major retailers not there's not many small and small mom pop shops on there. So a lot of these major retailers, I don't I can't really see it going anywhere.

Tara Thurber: 7:15

Cool. All right, that well, that's fantastic, especially for customer incentives. How else could we use Giftogram?

Brian Duran: 7:24

So number two for me is employee gifts.

Tara Thurber: 7:27

Okay.

Brian Duran: 7:28

This one's very great for the holidays. I've read a lot of studies, and it's they're really easy to find online. But having an employee gift program going on in your company really helps with customer, your employee retention.

Tara Thurber: 7:43

Yeah.

Brian Duran: 7:44

So it really lowers the amount of turnover. It's really expensive as an employee employer to hire and fire and hire and fire. And there's a lot of studies out there that just having these ongoing programs, if it's birthday gifts, anniversary gifts, holiday gifts, really encourages people to stick with you and really trust in your business. So setting up employee gifts, you know, if you're a pretty big company, say you have 5000 employees, how do you get 5000 gifts that isn't going to kill your budget, you know, shipping 5000 things is really expensive. Even if they're like only one pound, you're talking 5000 packages, and you have to make sure everyone receives it and make sure you have everyone's address. It's a whole it's a whole undertaking. You know, it takes one person probably all month to kind of figure all this out. With giftogram you can log in, you have a spreadsheet with everyone's email addresses, you upload that spreadsheet, you select the time you want to go, and guess what you're done.

Tara Thurber: 8:42

Wow. So you can automate it too.

Brian Duran: 8:45

Yeah, there's automation. So it's funny. So this actually happened pretty recently. And I always try to be really good with knowing everyone's birthdays.

Tara Thurber: 8:54

Yeah.

Brian Duran: 8:54

My coworkers, employees, I want to make sure I know everyone's birthdays. And it was my coworker Will's birthday on Friday. And I saw it on my calendar and I was like, alright, mental note, it's Will's birthday. Happy birthday

to him. And 8: 9:06

30 hit my inbox got flooded. And I was just all day busy, busy, busy on the phone, this and that and I realized I never said Happy Birthday to Will. And then he came up to me and he was like, I got my gift on birthday. And I was like, oh! yes, yeah. We just kind of like silly but like it really did. Like, help me out. Like I was happy. We already set that up and he got his gift and it was like that reminder of like, we didn't forget about you. And I didn't I just like got so busy.

Tara Thurber: 9:38

Yeah.

Brian Duran: 9:39

But you can set that up for all sorts of dates, like any sort of key dates. You know, we have birthdays work anniversaries already built in there, but the platform is very flexible. So if there's some sort of key dates you want to add in there, you know even from a sales side of things. If you want to add follow up somebody, you can say I want to follow up them three months. You can add that key date in there and then the gift around will be sent exactly then so you don't have to It just helps you a little bit. It's almost like the idea of like, the invention of having a phone that has all your phone numbers in there. You don't have to remember all the phone numbers anymore.

Tara Thurber: 10:08

Yeah, yeah.

Brian Duran: 10:10

It's the same kind of concept.

Tara Thurber: 10:12

Now, when a Giftogram is delivered, does the sender get an alert that it was delivered?

Brian Duran: 10:18

Yeah, daily, you're going to receive a scheduled list.

Tara Thurber: 10:21

Okay.

Brian Duran: 10:21

So daily, you're going to get a list saying these your scheduled gifts for that day? You know, on a small scale, you won't get them all that often. But on a large scale, if you're doing a lot of programs, you know, we have customers who use this for everything. So there's power words going out. Every day, there's birthdays, anniversaries, all sorts of things happening every day.

Tara Thurber: 10:41

Awesome. Seems like it's just a tool to kind of be automated and make things a little bit easier.

Brian Duran: 10:50

Yeah, it's one less thing to have to track.

Tara Thurber: 10:52

Absolutely. All right, cool. What what's your what's your next top five idea there? I know, you've got a couple more.

Brian Duran: 11:01

So I would say number three is a recruiting tool. So gifts for meetings are, I think, pretty important.

Tara Thurber: 11:09

Yeah.

Brian Duran: 11:10

You know, think about it right? In that we probably years ago, we'd probably be face to face having this conversation over a cup of coffee. And I would know, you know, you like your coffee, black or your like your coffee, light and sweet, whatever it may be. But right now we're we're online. So after this, I can I can send you a Giftogram or I could have done beforehand. And we could have had a cup of coffee together. And we can at least have that little bit of a connection. And I think as a recruiting tool, you can kind of use it one to be a little bit more a little closer with your, your prospect, or even after the fact you know, like say the deal closes everyone's happy. Again, you can send out a thank you gift.

Tara Thurber: 11:48

I as a recruiter, I absolutely love the idea of Giftogram, you know, for clients and for candidates. You know, when candidates started a new a new job have being able to have that automated or after the first three months having that automated but also in return giving something back to our clients to just as a thank you. I like that idea. And can you with the Giftagram itself? Can you change any imagery? Can you change the fonts when you send it in an email? Like how does that you work?

Brian Duran: 12:27

You read my mind, there are templates.

Tara Thurber: 12:30

Okay.

Brian Duran: 12:30

You bet have a good point of someone being hired, we have a lot to say about 80 different designs right now I know we're adding a bunch more.

Tara Thurber: 12:38

Okay.

Brian Duran: 12:39

So in the email, your, your company logo will be on top, there'll be a spot for the design of the gift card, actually. So we have a bunch of different designs already. So we actually have one one of my favorites that says welcome aboard. And it's a pirate, and he's on board. I know there's a bunch of Thank you designs, all sorts of all sorts of ones, there's one of my other favorites as the thank you one where it's it just francs a lot, and it's a hot dog holding ketchup. So we have a lot of cute things. And in those designs, you can also add your logo and customize and design them. And then we also have an online builder, which is kind of like a very simplified Photoshop where you can kind of build your own. So you can build a background, add some assets to it, add your images, add your logo, and you can kind of build your own little thing, we've tried to make it as simple as possible. So kind of anyone can do it, you don't have to be a master at design. It's a really a fun tool to use.

Tara Thurber: 13:33

And that's that's pretty great too. Because then you can take in your from a company aspect you take in and put your your colors on this card or do all of your, your branding that you need. So it calls Yeah, and it calls out to who it's coming from. So I think that's so brilliant. I like the idea of being able to not only pick and choose from templates, but to be able to design your own to I think is super awesome.

Brian Duran: 14:03

Yeah, and right below that you can add your own message. So you can personalize whatever you want in there. And you can also change who it's from so you can have it directly from your name or you can have from your company or you know a team name whatever it may be you have that option to let them know in the subject line who this is from or you can even mention what it's for.

Tara Thurber: 14:22

Wow. Oh, I'm excited for the holidays. It seems simplify a lot a lot in my mind at least man. Um, is there any outside costs or anything like that when you know joining giftogram or let's talk budgets.

Brian Duran: 14:45

Yeah, alright, so there is no fees to giftogram. There's no commitments or contracts. I've used this one time and say you don't want to use this again. We're not going to be like hey, you brucellosis stay with us for a year. We're not those guys. We hope that it's a fun enough experience and you had a good enough experience that you stick along with us. So it's simply the cost of the gift card. So if you want to send a$25 gift card, it's only going to cost you $25. The only additional cost is if you were going to go with the fiscal route, because we do a physical cards, okay, so if you wanted to add a greeting card, a matching greeting card, that greeting cards, an additional dollar, seal, coming to the greeting card and a an envelope, so you can put it in there. But if you just got the physical card, it's just the cost of the card, there's no additional cost to it. And we also offer free ground shipping after $500. So..

Tara Thurber: 15:36

Wow

Brian Duran: 15:37

Pretty cost effective.

Tara Thurber: 15:39

Yeah.

Brian Duran: 15:41

But that does kind of lead me into the fourth way, as a budget saver.

Tara Thurber: 15:45

Yeah.

Brian Duran: 15:46

And this is kind of an outside of the box approach to your own budget. I've seen a lot of people do this. But by the end of the year, you you've got to reach a certain budget. And if you don't, next year, you're smaller. So one way we've seen people do, which is clever. I wish it was my idea. But someone told me they're doing this. And I was like That's brilliant. Was they bought giftograms. So they bought physical cards. And they were able to move their budget use their budget for the year. And now they actually have money that's tangible that can be used for the following year. So they don't have to actually use all those gift cards at the end of the year, they already paid for them. So they have all of the following year to hand those gift cards out. So you can do that with physical cards. And you can also do that with digital, you can fund your account ahead of time.

Tara Thurber: 16:34

Yeah.

Brian Duran: 16:35

So instead of paying for them one off at a time, you can add you know, five grand to your account, and then just use it over the course of the next couple months. There's a lot of flexibility in our platform to allow you to do something like that.

Tara Thurber: 16:46

Is there a maximum amount that you could put into this? This kind of bucket?

Brian Duran: 16:54

No, there is no maximum. I'm sure if you try to put like a million dollars someone is going to give me a call and be like..

Tara Thurber: 17:01

Give me a little red flag there.

Brian Duran: 17:04

Did you mean to do that?

Tara Thurber: 17:06

Right, right. All right. Is there a minimum that your that you can spend? I mean, I don't know if somebody is really going to spend a send $1 gift card. But is there something that you guys kind of prefer or say to clients coming in and doing this?

Brian Duran: 17:24

If you're gonna fund your account, we usually recommend a minimum of 500. But we do have some flexibility.

Tara Thurber: 17:29

Yeah.

Brian Duran: 17:30

Anything below$500, you can just kind of pay one off at a time.

Tara Thurber: 17:33

Yeah.

Brian Duran: 17:34

The gift cards are at are $5 to $500 and increments of five. So you couldn't necessarily do $1 gift card, but your low value is a $5 gift card.

Tara Thurber: 17:44

Okay. Do you find that and just kind of straying a little bit here? Do you find that it takes away? That personalization process, I love the fact that you can personalize the card? But have your clients ever mentioned anything like giving, it's giving somebody a gift card? It's not a particular gift, per se that somebody's like put a lot of thought into? Do it? Has there been any feedback in regards to that from any clients?

Brian Duran: 18:15

Through we've had some feedback on that.

Tara Thurber: 18:17

Yeah.

Brian Duran: 18:18

A few clients have decided to go with the physical option with the green card. We can kind of like, you can put a custom message in there. And you can actually put signatures in there as an image as well.

Tara Thurber: 18:29

That's Awesome. Okay.

Brian Duran: 18:30

But a lot of people do have that sentiment. And I always kind of go back to data. I'm a very data driven person. And there are plenty of studies out there. The number currently right now is 84% of employees prefer a gift card over something else. It's hard to find that like very, you know, like, Oh, this is a sentimental gift that really registers with everyone.

Tara Thurber: 18:52

Yeah.

Brian Duran: 18:53

You might have a gift basket that has like chocolate or this and that in there. And the person who receives it is like I don't even like chocolate. And like for you, you're like I spent all this time on and love energy, that's great. But when you when you kind of go against things like gift baskets, we are percentage of like what people actually want, it really leans more towards us, especially with 200 Plus options.

Tara Thurber: 19:18

Yeah.

Brian Duran: 19:19

I mean, it even is a little further than that. Because we also have like DoorDash and Grubhub. So now you can have food from your locals places, we have Instacart. So you can get things from your local grocery stores. And there's a virtual mascot on there. So if you don't find anything on that list that you don't like you get that virtual mask card and use it anywhere else.

Tara Thurber: 19:39

That's fantastic. It really there's so many options for individuals to utilize these gifts. I think that that's brilliant. So you were talking about DoorDash and Grubhub to tell me a little bit more about how somebody could utilize that. I mean Just thinking even further outside the box and going deeper into the company companies utilizing it.

Brian Duran: 20:08

Funny, that actually leads us to number five, oh, team meetings is number five another list. And it's a great way to, to kind of get everyone together. We used to do it all the time. I mean, we're hybrid. Now, some people aren't. But we used to have lunch in the office kind of all the time with each other, whether we were ordering a pizza, or Jersey Mike's or something like that. And that really went away when the the pandemic happened. So an alternate thing we've done is whenever we have meetings, we send each other, you know, DoorDash, gift cards or something like that. And we can all eat together on Zoom. It sounds silly, but a lot of companies are doing this. So team meetings, you know, you can have coffee together, because there's coffee options on there. And Giftogram has the ability to, if you didn't want to send that gift card with all 200 different options, you can select your own categories. So there's categories, well, really called catalogs. And you can do a food catalog where it's only the food options. So it kind of limits everyone to selecting lunch, we have a coffee catalog. So there's all different hot coffee options that can choose there. And you also have the option to make your own catalog, you know, you run into this where if a company is like, if it's a fast food, you know, a quick serve kind of company, and they're like, well, we don't want our competitors on there, we can go in and remove their competitors. Or if you had a certain selection, where you were like, well, I really only want to offer these 20, you can do that. Or if you're like oh, I only really want to have like a few donation options. And someone else you can also do something like that. So we've seen a lot of companies kind of create their own little catalogs, there's a lot of flexibility in our in our platform to do something like that. And then on top of that, you know, as if you're having team meetings, if you have multiple locations, and there's a manager all these different locations, your gift room account can be as simple and as complex as you want it to be, you know, if you're a single location, you're like, Well, I'm going to run the account and I have a few people on gifting, you can do that. Or you can be very robust, where you can have multiple managers in there. And they have different teams they give to, and you can manage their budget, you can manage all of their users, you can really take into a very complex mechanism. So you have that ability within giftogram, we can kind of keep it super simple, or you can get really into it and really manage all of this with all your teams and users.

Tara Thurber: 22:28

This is awesome. I know to just from team meetings, like we use, we get a GrubHub account. But what I find is all of a sudden, I'm like, oh, okay, we've got a team meeting, I've already forgotten to order lunch, I'm sitting down in front of the meeting. And then at the end of the day, I'm not utilizing that either. And so but and you end up losing it, it's more of a use it or lose it. So when something like this is given, we can use this for the specific meeting, or you can use it another day to right.

Brian Duran: 23:02

Yes, right, since you have 12 months to redeem.

Tara Thurber: 23:04

Yeah.

Brian Duran: 23:04

If you miss that meeting, you don't have to buy another one, you can just wait until the next meeting and use the one that you already received. So you know it, there's a lot of platforms that are similar to us. But I think we really kind of look at the actual retailers as more of our competition, like companies that are like GrubHub that are selling their own gift cards or even Amazon or Target or Walmart, a lot of people are going direct.

Tara Thurber: 23:27

Yeah.

Brian Duran: 23:27

And they're realizing there's not as much flexibility when you use a platform like us, you know, you can get x amount of gift cards from GrubHub. But they're not going to have all the customization that we have in here. They're not going to have all the delivery mechanisms, the flexibility of not having to lose it right away.

Tara Thurber: 23:44

Right.

Brian Duran: 23:46

Which is it's kind of a pain to have something like that, where it's like, there's a timer and you're like, Oh, I gotta do this now. And it adds a little layer of stress that is not needed in your in your day to day.

Tara Thurber: 23:56

Yeah, no, I really liked the idea of the flexibility of it. This is really awesome. Brian, especially, you know, now that we're we're diving into the holidays, I feel that so many, you know, individuals and businesses could really benefit from utilizing Giftogram. Where does one go to get onto the platform and start checking everything out.

Brian Duran: 24:20

So they can go directly to giftogram.com that's G I F T O G R A M, you can go right on there and get any information you'd like. You can see the whole list of retailers, all that stuff. There's a Contact Us button. So if you want to check out a demo beforehand, before committing to anything, our account managers are ready to go at any point. They can kind of walk you through everything. You can tell them what you're looking for. They'll show you all the tools that you'd be using. And it won't be like a long, boring thing. We're not going to show you everything. If you don't need automation, they're not going to show you that whole thing. If you're just looking up lists, they can show you how to do all that or customizing or if you want to do jump right in, you can just create an account right then and there. And really kind of go in and click around yourself. We also have tons of videos on how everything works, too. So there's a lot of resources out there.

Tara Thurber: 25:11

Oh, well, this is wonderful. I know it's taken a load off of my shoulders. I'm going to be diving into Giftogram this this holiday season for sure.

Brian Duran: 25:20

Excited to have you!

Tara Thurber: 25:21

Yeah, yeah. And again, thank you for my very own Giftogram. I cannot wait to use it.

Brian Duran: 25:27

Ofcourse.

Tara Thurber: 25:28

And thank you so much, Brian, for hopping on hopping on today. I'd love to get this out to as many people as we can. Because you know what the holidays here and the thoughts and the worries of things not being delivered. I think this is a great idea that is simple, easy to use and beneficial for clients and whomever they're giving it to.

Brian Duran: 25:52

Yeah, there's no logistical issues. There's no stress behind it.

Tara Thurber: 25:55

Yeah.

Brian Duran: 25:55

It's really simple to do. And if you ever need any help, or just phone call away.

Tara Thurber: 26:00

Awesome. Brian, thank you so much for hopping on today. It's really been a pleasure chatting with you.

Brian Duran: 26:05

Thank you, for having me.

Tara Thurber: 26:09

We are DefinedTalent at DefineLogic service coming to you at Top5. Make it a great day.