Why a personalized photobook as a corporate gift?
In 2024, companies globally spent $350B on corporate swag. These range from the low-end of baseball caps and pens at tradeshows to highly branded packaging for premium items like wine and EVOO gifted by high-ticket item agents like insurance, real estate, and million miler frequent flier programs. Most of these ends up in landfills. The premium stuff languishes in the garage storage because they are too pretty to be thrown away! In the cacophony of marketing messages and the overriding need to be eco-sustainable, corporate gifting is facing a significant dilemma: how do you get your brand out there, reward your most loyal customers, and get them to return year after year without plying them with landfill fodder?
Many of us have made, received or experienced the power of photobooks to tell a story and keep and store cherished memories and experiences. We all know that the photobook is about the most personal and power-packed instrument with which memories can be stored and re-lived.
Creating a thoughtful experience
We work collaboratively with you to design the photobook and then source from our stable of fulfillment partners. Whether it is a premium layflat album with gold-foil debossed linen or a budget-friendly booklets, we are able to find something to fit the purpose. We work with designers on the details inside-out: we define each page with a template to accommodate your marketing messages, to what goes into the box (the book, a tissue wrap, or a belly band), right through to the custom branded box. This ensures your customers get a premium unboxing experience when they receive their personalized gift.
In some cases, tour operators may have professionally taken photos or they may want to promote next season’s itineraries, the new spa in the resort, or new entertainment options for next season’s cruise. Our platform allows brands to provide the photos for the photobook in the form of stock photos which users can choose to use to bulk up the book, or in the case of clients like cruise and theme parks who may have roaming photographers taking photos of guests, these can be folders of photos for each guest, individually pre-filled in the customer’s photobook project. Our AI auto-fill helps make sense of it and present an almost ready-to-print book to your customers.
We also then white-label the book builder software to your colors. When your customer clicks on that CTA, they arrive at a bespoke photobook project that is already 80% completed for them which looks like it’s an extension of your website. They are always able to add their own photos to make it their own. This is a key step as it allows your customer to co-create this experience and product with you. This ensures they will cherish your gift as it is *their* photobook.
Launching a Campaign
We have designed the way of launching a photobook gift campaign to be similar to mounting an email campaign, something your CRM manager is already familiar with. No one wants to learn a new software!
You start with a spreadsheet of customers, with individualized details like the travel dates, itineraries, cities they visited, cruise ship name, even the captain of the ship for that particular cruise. The amount of personalization and details you want to include are only limited by the richness of your database!
Fictitious Case Study:
The Poseidon Journeys Cruise Company
Let’s imagine you run customer loyalty at Poseidon Journeys, a mid-sized cruise company with 5 ultra-luxury vessels that run various routes throughout the Pacific Northwest. They have just 500 first-class balcony-view cabins per vessel and want to offer every couple a premium photobook.
The weather in Alaska is notoriously unpredictable, and for many of their guests, their iPhone photos may not always capture the grandeur that is Alaska. So Poseidon adds stock photos from drones and professionally taken photos which customers can use.
Together, we design a book which are book-ended on the first 5 and last 3 pages with stock and marketing content We then add a belly band around it, where the back of the band comes with a $500 off referral code for the next trip.
On the front, we indicate the vessel that they sailed on (one of 5!)
We then add in a personalized card from the Captain and First Officer of that sailing, with whom each guest would have typically spent 2 weeks together. For return-customers, maybe they also get a customized Cushion cover. The options are endless!
The User Experience
For the Manager, you prepare a Campaign of (say) 500 rows of data, and import to our Rewards Campaign dashboard.
This is all the Campaign manager needs to do. Everything else happens automatically after. This is what your customer will experience:
They first get an email. From the usual sender address. In it, it will explain the program, and have a CTA which brings them to our book maker software.
From here, they can then proceed to upload photos from the local hard drive, or by scanning a QR code and upload from their (or spouse’s) mobile phone.
Most details of the book will be pre-filled via the campaign sheet. Titles, Subtitles, and variable data plus the fixed marketing pages. If available, customer’s delivery address can be pulled from the campaign. They then get the opportunity to check and edit the address if needed.
This makes completing the book and checking out slick and quick.
