Using Gifting to Drive Ecommerce Sales on Shopify

One of the most popular Dovetale features is gifting. Gifting offers endless possibilities, but we’ll focus on ways that lead to sales for your store.

A quick overview of gifting on Dovetale

If you run a Shopify store, you know how hard it is to send gifts to partners, affiliates, and influencers. You need to collect their name, address, state, country, color, size, flavor, scent, etc… It’s A LOT of work, especially if you are sending hundreds or even thousands of gifts per month. Dovetale connects with your Shopify backend, syncs up the SKU’s and allows you to create templatized gift packs such as this one:

In the template (Partner Gift Package) above I’ve set criteria to let influencers pick 2 of the 3 items and choose their shoe size if they pick the sneaker gift. On the influencer side, I can easily choose which one I want:

and enter in my shipping details (I can even save this to my profile if I’d like to continue sharing this with the merchant):

Then you can monitor the status of each gift and measure the gift value budget over time:

How does gifting increase sales?

If you’re still reading, it’s likely because you’ve felt the pain of how hard it is to coordinate gifts to influencers and affiliates. Hopefully the above makes it easier for you! Sending gifts to people is easy with Dovetale, but so should making money. Let’s walk through an example:

Let’s say you’ve found a couple of influencers that you want to bring into your affiliate program. The best way to prospect them is to get their attention with a free gift. Once they’ve applied, been accepted, and redeemed their gift, you have their attention. Now, speed is important. Influencers are being reached out to all the time and upon gift redemption (or even acceptance to your community) you should set them up with an affiliate code/ link as well - allow them to become one of your biggest fans and align your incentives together. Often times it’s helpful to send a thank you note or a personal message in the gift package you send out.

PRO TIP: Change your gift settings on Dovetale to something specific so you can make sure orders are treated differently on Shopify. For example, everything that has the label: “Dovetale Gift” would be fulfilled with a handwritten note saying something like: “we’d love to see you unbox this on your YouTube page”, or “Post an IG story with your swipe up link and we’ll send over another gift”. The activation and potential partnership possibilities are endless so get creative!

Great influencer/ community partnerships are important and the more you foster the relationships, the more monetary return you will likely get. Setting up community members with unique codes and links are effective ways to increase sales and track which influencers are driving results for you. Gifts are simply a way for you to get their attention, create advocacy, and also reward your community members for achieving milestones! From there, your gifting costs are simply ‘influencer acquisition’ costs and hopefully, you will return much more profits than the cost of your gifts.