It can be tough to come up with unique ideas for client holiday gifts. We’ve sent North Face fleece shirts, hosted parties, created custom designed posters, and even hand painted ornaments in years past. To thank our clients this year – and show them we appreciate working on their branding, websites, and other marketing projects – we tried to create a fun, memorable holiday gift.
We listen to music every day, so we shared some of our favorite songs with our clients on a mix cd. (Sounds kind of uh, frugal, we know.) But this project gave us a chance to stay within a budget, share our creativity, and give our clients something besides a jumbo tin of assorted flavored popcorn.
We settled on a theme of “A Vital Mixer” – a virtual cocktail party for our clients. We carried this “mixer” theme across the gift packages by compiling some of our favorite cocktail recipes from each team member, creating printed recipe cards for the cocktails, and developing a Web page where they could download drink recipes and share their own.
Here’s the CD cover:
We packaged the Vital Mixer CD with printed recipe cards. (It’s not too late to ring in 2010 and download all the cocktail recipe cards. Cheers!)
We then mailed out the packages, publicized the virtual cocktail party with social media by tweeting and Facebooking links to the online party. We also sent an email marketing piece. This type of multi-faceted marketing effort is genuinely fun and exciting for us. We love to bring several elements together under a single theme.
See what we just did there? We created a product, in this case the recipe card and music, that was packaged in real life and online. We were hoping this would do a few things for us:
1. Show our clients we appreciate them.
2. Build our brand as a creative, fun marketing company.
3. Create a community-oriented online destination to welcome our clients.
4. Drive traffic to our site.
5. Showcase a few of the services we offer in one marketing campaign – design, email marketing, web development, merchandising, social media.
The concept of the actual graphic design was to channel the glam of a ’60s cocktail party mixed – or perhaps shaken and strain over ice – with the charm of holidays spent fireside with Bing and Perry. Early in the process, we looked to Christmas albums of yore for inspiration:
There were no stock photos that met our standards, so we held our own photo shoot. I got a few curious looks as I walked down the hall with a martini shaker at 3 p.m., but we think the result was worth it. Take a look at the original photo before we adjusted the color and added texture.
We’ve received lots of positive responses from clients, who say it was a unique, fun package to receive in the mail. It makes us glad we didn’t send another tin of popcorn.
