How to Come Up with the Perfect Christmas Promotional Gift

The holiday season is ideal to surprise your employees and business partners with a small Christmas present. This will let them know that you also think of them during their days off and that you appreciate their long-term support.

Although some entrepreneurs are against sending business gifts on Christmas, their reasons for such thinking are rarely relevant (saying that employees will then expect gifts every year). Business gifts – much like promotional ones – build trust between you and your employees, suppliers and partners. I doubt there is anyone who would not appreciate a gift!

But before you start shopping for a Christmas business gift, you need to answer three important questions: Who? What? When?

Who?

You can send a Christmas business gift to a small group of employees or to a larger number of individuals, including business partners. Of course, you decide for yourself – but I’m still giving you a hint to help you choose the gift recipients.

Answer the question: Is our company a small or big one?

If you keep in touch with a smaller number of regular customers and rarely do business with new ones, it likely means that you are probably working with a smaller number of employees and that your company is still in the early stages of development. In this case, you can give a gift to a larger number of employees – it is much better if you have the opportunity to give a gift to each of your employees. Only in this way can you surely get rid of the envy or possible anger of the workers who did not receive a gift.

However, if you have been in business for a long time and your company is known in the market, this probably means that sending gifts to every employee and business partner will not be possible. You meet a large number of individuals every day, and certainly not every one of them expects a Christmas present. While a business partner with whom you have recently successfully completed a demanding project will be delighted by a gift, you cannot say the same for an entrepreneur you may have only met twice.

What?

When actually choosing a Christmas business gift, the size of your company is just as important. With more employees, you may find it harder to afford more expensive, high-quality gifts – the sum of these may exceed your budget. If you intend to give a gift to all employees and business partners, think in the direction of ‘goodie bags’ – several smaller or one smaller gift of great importance can save you from the dilemma. Otherwise (if you do business with three, maybe five people), you can buy something bigger for everyone.

Of course, it’s not always about size – it is important that employees feel valued and that their gifts are of similar value, even if they are not the same. Sometimes we opt for personalized gifts, in which case we need to know our employees well.

This leads me to my next advice – when buying, be careful that your business gift does not offend the gift recipient. For example, if you are working with a partner from a Muslim country on one of the projects, avoid gifting them a bottle of wine at all times! Why not give them a Slovenian ethnological product? This will not only remind them of you, but also of Slovenia.

When?

Although we often decide to shop for Christmas gifts quite late, it is different with business gifts. The latter are ordered in large quantities, and sometimes the order also includes a print of the company’s name or logo. For this reason, it is wise to order business Christmas gifts much earlier – preferably in October, but usually it is not too late in November.
After all, you can surprise your employees as well as business partners throughout the whole month of December. It often happens that the company does not organize a Christmas or New Year’s party for various reasons – many workers want to spend the holidays with their families, which is completely understandable. We also meet less often with many partners, especially if they come from abroad. That is why it is good to order business gifts for the first week of the last month of the year, because then you have enough time to give them.

Another advantage of ordering business gifts early is that you can be sure of the actual arrival of actual products and that stocks are still full. It would be extremely embarrassing to realize a week before the holidays that there are no more gifts available from your chosen provider. At the same time, you also have a wider selection of options, which means you are sure to find exactly the gift you are looking for.

My advice is to start choosing gifts at least two months before actually meeting with the gift recipient. Make a shortlist of products you might want to surprise them with, then choose the ones that will best suit your employees. With timely selection and ordering, you will spend the rest of the year with one less worry.

At the end of the year, we look back and think about everything we have achieved in the past twelve months. That is why December is the best time of the year to thank your employees and show them how much you appreciate their constant help, support and loyalty. It also lets them know that you are looking forward to future joint projects.