Issue 030: How Stripe Builds Loyalty with Gifts, A Clever Birthday Trick to Boost Sales & More
April 09, 2025 | #030 | Free Version
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🎁 How Stripe builds loyalty with personalized gifts
🎂 A clever birthday trick to boost sales
🎯 How to spot emerging trends & future-proof your business
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How Stripe Builds Loyalty with Personalized Gifts
However, Stripe, the payment processor company, takes it a step further and does something no one else does. They send personalized gifts to customers who achieve certain milestones.
Nicolás Cerdeira shares some examples in his Failory newsletter:
- To celebrate $3,250 in MRR, they sent a two-Corgi-owner founder a corgi plush and some dog swag
- To celebrate reaching 150k subscribers, they sent a newsletter writer a rocket sculpture
- To celebrate $35K in MRR, they sent a founder a 3D render of his yellow Vespa
- To celebrate $50K in ARR, they sent a founder a 3D render of his boat
- To celebrate $1M GMV, they sent a founder a personal note and some coffee stuff
- To celebrate $1M in revenue, they sent a motorcycle fan founder a helmet with his company’s colours and logo
- To celebrate $2M in revenue, they sent a tennis fan founder some tennis balls with his company’s colours and logo
Here are a few things you should keep in mind if you want to use gifts as a marketing strategy:
Don’t add your logo: Most CEOs and high-profile people are never going to wear or use something advertising someone else’s business. Put their logos, their names on the gift. Never put yours. When you make a gift all about you, it’s not a gift.
Don’t break the bank: If you have no budget, send a handwritten note reiterating how much you appreciate them. Handwritten notes are one of the most cost-effective ways to make a memorable impression. It’s better to send a classy note than a cheap, mediocre gift.
Personalize the gift: Personalization is what turns an ordinary gift into an extraordinary one. For example, if someone travels a lot, find them a high-quality travel bag and have it monogrammed with their initials. They’ll like it a lot more than a non-branded bag.
Make your gift the best in class: If you’re claiming that your product or service is best in class, then your gifts should be, too. Don’t tell everyone that you’re first-class, and then send out plastic-keychain beer openers with your logo on them. Your gifts should always align with your core values.
Make it truly unique: Ideally, you should gift something that you can’t find in stores. Imagine sourcing an item from a supermarket and having your client and his family walk in and see the gift you sent them on clearance for 70 percent off.
Choose a lasting item: Don’t gift chocolates, fruit baskets or something like that. They’ll be a blimp on the radar. Instead gift something they’ll showcase or use in their everyday lives.
🔬 Scientific Research: A Clever Birthday Trick to Boost Sales
Sending your customer a birthday wish email with a price discount is a popular marketing tactic.
And they work. According to Experian, birthday emails generate 179% more clicks and 481% more transactions than average marketing emails.
But there is a simple trick you can follow to increase sales even more.
🔬 In one study, two researchers ran an experiment in which consumers saw a pasta dinner promotion for a restaurant. The price was set at $39. But the cents would match the participant’s birthday.
So if someone was born on April 15, the price would be $39.15.
The result? Researchers found that people were more likely to buy when their birthday number appeared in the price.
So next time you send a birthday discount, try personalizing the price using their birth date. It’s a small detail that can lead to more sales.
📖 Book of the Week: How to Spot Emerging Trends & Future-Proof Your Business
This week, I want to highlight Scale: Seven Proven Principles to Grow Your Business and Get Your Life Back by Jeff Hoffman & David Finkel.
The book is all about how to rapidly grow your business, without letting it take over your life.
Question One: “What can I do today that I couldn’t do yesterday?”
“(E.g., share a video with the world from my cell phone; have 2,000 people join me for a Webinar; video conference with five of my team members for effectively no cost; access hosted solution software for nominal fees where once I would have had to pay thousands or millions to develop the tool on my own; etc.)
“The goal of this question is to make sure you constantly reassess the landscape of possibilities. The world changes so fast now that every morning when you wake up, something has changed that may create a brand-new opportunity for your business.”
Question Two: “What things do I observe in the world that . . .”
“Startle and Surprise Me: (E.g., how ubiquitous smart phones have become—I feel lost when mine isn’t at hand or when it’s out of power; how when a question in conversation comes up that we don’t know the answer to, someone just Googles the answer on the spot; how little direct mail I get in the mail anymore; etc.)
“Identifying the things in the world that surprise you prompts you to integrate relevant changes into your business.
“Delight and Intrigue Me: (E.g., how Wikipedia makes finding an answer so easy; how convenient it is to order off Amazon.com; how I can be a voyeur in the lives of old acquaintances on Facebook without even talking with them; how much I live my life to a soundtrack of my choosing; etc.)
“Think of ways to apply these intriguing new tools to the work you do for your customers.
“Terrify Me: (E.g., how short people’s attention spans are now; how overwhelmed with choices I feel; how powerfully the media plays up fear, making the world appear so unsafe and dangerous; how intermixed the economy is and how things that I have no control over can wreck my business; etc.)
“This exercise can help you spot threats from outside your industry or your normal range of competitors that you might otherwise have never seen coming.”
Question Three: How has the way people are buying things in the world changed (especially outside of my industry)?
“(E.g., how we consume bite by bite with micropayments; how we comparison shop online, using aggregated Web sites and comparison engines to find products that we may not have known existed; how we listen to what other people say about the product via customer reviews, and how we no longer rely on the seller or advertising to educate ourselves; how we use new forms of payment that didn’t exist a few years ago; etc.)”
Question Four: What is changing in the lives of our customers (whether it has anything to do with our company or not)?
“(E.g., they are getting older as a whole [on average five to ten years older]; they are spending two hours a day on social media; regulatory restrictions are making their lives much tougher and increasing the time they must spend per site on compliance; they are struggling to find the right workforce domestically; etc.)”
Question Five: “Wouldn’t it be cool if . . .” (Come up with at least ten endings to this statement.)
(E.g., wouldn’t it be cool if we had a waiting list for our service that was booked six months out; wouldn’t it be cool if I could eliminate all spam from my inbox; wouldn’t it be cool if customers paid us to give them a sales quote; wouldn’t it be cool if we had an app that thousands of our customers used that taught us exactly what they loved and used with our product; wouldn’t it be cool if I could be onstage playing with a rock band; etc.)
Question Six: Imagine you were starting to build your business from scratch all over again today. What business would you ideally build? What would it look like? Why?
“Pretending that your business didn’t exist at all and you were starting from scratch today allows you to get creative about your business without worrying about all the existing worries, challenges, givens, and investments that you normally take for granted. “
“Regularly reimagine your business using this type of blue-sky methodology so you keep your company fresh and relevant. In a rapidly changing world, it’s the only way to keep your business safe.”
You can find the book on Amazon or any major bookstore. I highly recommend reading the full book.
Thanks for reading. I hope you have found at least some of these tips helpful.
Until next week!
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