Don't forget to organise Christmas merch

+ the amazing Heineken Squid Game reference

Hello! I have a bit of an agenda today;

1. The fun - Heineken

2. The knowledge - good xmas gifts for clients

3. The ask - pretty please answer a quick reader question

If you haven’t watched Squid Game, the reference won’t make sense, but the B2C ability to make quick pop culture references is the biggest thing I wish B2B could do.

Aside from being really witty, it’s just fun to see how many crossover references are actually possible?

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Getting B2B Christmas gifts right

Christmas season is already upon us, and with shipping still greatly impacted by covid, you will want to get any custom merch organised ASAP. End of year gifts can really help out both your Customer Success and Sales teams, but only if the gift hits the right spot.

Customer Success gift guide

First of all, you’ll want to really think about how much you want to spend on accounts. It could be a % of their contract value, or a bracket value depending on how important (or how close to renewal) that customer is.

At the top end, a handwritten message and card will go down a treat. You can help your CS team with this process by writing 5 or so set phrases that they can cycle through. Aim to pull the heartstrings, and encourage them to drop in a personal reference if they can.

Getting custom printed Christmas cards are also a nice touch. Mid-tier customers can get a printed message with a signature, and anything below that can get an e-card.

A team photo (preferrably with the customer support/success team members in it to make them more “real”) on one side and blank on the other has been my go-to in past years, and you can easily get this printed (and quite cheap!) from vistaprint or moo.

Cardly is an Aussie startup that can help with the printing/handwriting/delivery of any cards you want to send.

Now for the actual gifts!

I love gift giving so I always love the brainstorming part of client gifts. The trick is to cover off all of these bases:

1. Functional gifts - if you can’t think of something people will use then default to food, but food can appear lazy so it should not be your first port of call

2. Relevent to the season or location - no wintery gifts in Australia, thank you

3. Related to your product

My predictions for this year’s gift themes (feel free to steal, it’ll only make my prediction more accurate)

• Branded picnic items - baskets, cutlery/charcuterie sets, blankets

• Outdoor items - lawn games, hiking gear (bottles, bucket hats), beach towels, generally anything that will get you out of the house to combat lockdown vibes

• Your standard corporate items like keepcups, t-shirts, stickers, etc.

• Dinners and drinks out - in person catch ups will make a return in place of physical gifts

Sales incentives guide

Another way to use Christmas merch is to offer it as an incentive to close more deals by the end of the month/quarter/year. The best way to package this up though, is to pitch something that could go towards the Christmas party for the team (or if a remote team, family/holiday packs for key stakeholders).

I know Perkbox UK did real 6 foot Christmas trees that went down amazingly, but we don’t have that here in Aus.

I still think a picnic theme could work, especially if you basically position it as “we’ll shout your whole team a BBQ lunch, you just pick the venue and we’ll make sure everything is provided” or something.

This is kind of where it could also be “we know Dec/Jan is slow for work, so if you sign up before Nov X we’ll give you those two months for free”.

One thing to be careful of here is having a cut-off date for onboarding new customers, which should be organised with your CS team.

The risk you take onboarding new customers close to Christmas is that they go on annual leave for 3 weeks and then you’ve lost all momentum with them using your product, they’re hard to get a hold of, and then you’re just waiting for them to churn. Have a “last onboarding” date, and then resume onboarding from early next year.

Sales incentives can be more fun/silly, but you still want to try and hit the functional and relevant to your product points from above.

(Honestly I love the brainstorm aspect of this so if you want help thinking of something, I will 100% brainstorm with you)

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The reader survey bit

I’ve said previously that I wanted to try pre-writing the entirety of the next season of Mehdeeka in advance, and after now prepping a few issues, I’m finding a common thread. Mainly it’s that they’re quite long - and I haven’t even started adding in interviews yet.

So I wanted to ask what you would prefer. Please just click the link that corresponds to your answer (it’ll just go to a gif), I’ll use click through rates to determine which direction to go in:

I’m happy to read a long (1,500+ words) email that covers one topic in depth

I’d rather have longer topics broken up into multiple issues (500-1000 words max)

Until I figure it all out, I’ll be sending sporadic one-offs just like today’s email.

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Don’t forget the links

Gen-Z apparently don’t understand folder structures

I used to just dump everything into my personal G-Drive (honestly docs.new is the best shortcut but also detours right around saving to a specific location and it’s too tempting to skip). But in a work setting, especially when working out of the cloud, dumping everything into one folder just doesn’t work for sharing files, especially if you’re searching for a colleague’s document and kind of haphazardly guessing what they named it.

TL;DR my personal opinion is folders and naming structures matter in the workplace.

Fantastic Texts

A repository for best practice or high quality brand text messages! I love these libraries of good things - see also reallygoodemails.com and goodemailcopy.com

A brief history of marketing on matchbooks

Ahh, another lost art in the world of marketing. A good, brief read about designing ads for matchbooks.