When you zoom out and look at the sprawling ecosystem of ecommerce apps, tools, and hacks, it’s easy to forget that it’s actually a pretty basic concept.
One person lists something for sale on the internet. Another person buys that thing. And that’s that.
But over the past couple of decades, this simple idea has been marching through time, picking up complex tactics and strategies along the way. Deciphering what’s useful and what’s not takes next-level skill, and it’s not getting easier.
Each year brings a whole new layer of challenges for ecommerce retailers:
- What new technology do you need to adopt? (And what old technology do you need to can?)
- How are changing economic conditions impacting plans?
- What new consumer behaviors are trending, and how can you meet them?
- What’s the competition like in your category?
That’s a short (verrry short) list of things keeping founders up at night. In the year 2025, where hordes of people are shopping online with more competing options than ever, there’s one especially niggling question: What can ecommerce brands do to acquire more new customers?
Read on and learn how ecommerce dream team Zest and Klaviyo turn something your shoppers are already doing into a customer acquisition flywheel.
The Ultimate Word of Mouth Campaign: Gifting
Gift-buyers are going after the good stuff.
When shopping for gifts, there’s a lot more psychology at play than you might think. As the person giving the gifts, your brain is firing on all cylinders through every step, from browsing brand after brand to writing the gift note to handing it off to the lucky recipient and anticipating their reaction.
Each phase of gifting activates the brain’s reward pathways for everyone involved — gifters and recipients. Aside from a wave of oxytocin flooding the ol’ noodle, there are some deeply felt social impacts of gifting, too.
Gifters want their present to reflect well on themselves — they want the goods they give to come off as thoughtful, high-quality, and conscientious. On the other side, recipients often feel like the gift they receive is a direct reflection of how appreciated they are or how valuable their relationship is to the gifter. And beyond the physical gift itself, it’s not uncommon for the sentiment surrounding the gift to be the most impactful part of it all.
Gifting elicits feelings of trust and deepens bonds between people.
Because of these social, emotional, and psychological factors blending together for every modern giftable moment, people are putting more weight than ever on the items they choose to wrap up and give away. Waning are the days of generic gift cards being “good enough” for gifters or recipients as people lean into intentional, memorable gifting.
When someone chooses your products from the endless sea of competitors on the internet, it’s an endorsement that they know they’re gifting something that makes them look good, feel good, and give something that’s actually really good.
In other words, someone gifting your products is the apex of customer referrals.
Tap Intentional Gifting and Unwrap Massive Customer Acquisition
Online gifting is growing.
The fact is that people are increasingly turning to the World Wide Web to check off their gift lists. In 2024, the number of people who planned to shop for holiday gifts exclusively online was up 23% over 2023. And it makes sense:
- Every brand they personally love most likely has an easily shoppable online store (and if they don’t, then what are they even doing?).
- Browsing digital shelves for the perfect present is a heckuva lot more convenient than driving around to brick-and-mortar locations.
- Critical parts of overall ecommerce adoption are a breeze now: flexible payment options, 2-day shipping, fast (and often free) returns, and on-demand customer support have brought parity to the ecommerce versus in-person shopping experiences.
- Zest is available to brands to fully optimize the online gifting flow, whether it’s 1:1 gifting or bulk multiship orders, virtually stripping all the friction out of the process.
The ecommerce industry has been taking baby steps since its inception to gain ground on brick-and-mortar retail. That “sprawling ecosystem” of tools and platforms we mentioned in the first sentence of this post? They all build on the simple concept of buying and selling online so that brands can scale how much they sell and customers can actually enjoy the process of buying.
Gifting platforms are relative newcomers to the sea of ecommerce tools — and they couldn’t have arrived at a better time.
Historically, ecommerce development has been fully focused on the consumer who’s shopping for themselves, but with the aforementioned trends and shifts in where people shop for gifts, the gifting experience was sorely due for some TLC.
Leading brands like Milk Bar, Graza, and Levain Bakery couldn’t help but notice that the spike in gifting from shoppers put a glaring spotlight on the inefficiencies and friction of existing processes. When people want to send a gift, they either have to figure it out for themselves or enter into a lengthy back-and-forth with someone at the brand.
This led to gifting churn, delayed processing times, and an overall cumbersome experience. And in Ecommerceland, any experience described as “cumbersome” needs an overhaul ASAP.
Zest helps brands lean into intentional gifting.
Brands that have implemented a purpose-built platform for online gifting haven’t just given the customer what they’ve been yearning for, but they’ve seen massive channel growth as a result.
With Zest on their site, online brands meet the demand for online gifting head-on with features like:
- Multiship gifting, enabling shoppers to send hundreds of gifts in one transaction.
- Instant e-gifting via email, link, or text.
- Personalized gift messages and digital card designs (talk about that feel-good oxytocin, eh?).
- The ability to easily add on gift wrap, handwritten notes, and other sweet gifting details.
Milk Bar cut gift order processing time by 85%, making it possible to extend sales windows (and save employees from burning out). Brightland grew its corporate gifting channel by more than 50% in its first season with Zest. And Levain Bakery saw a 100% year-over-year increase in corporate gift sales after tapping the platform.
These are even clearer signals that customers who are looking for thoughtful, intentional gifts online from brands they love are all about easier gifting. You wouldn’t expect your everyday shopper to jump through hoops like contact forms or phone calls every time they want to buy something for themselves, so it’s no wonder people are welcoming streamlined gifting with wide open arms.
Gifting doesn’t just drive retention — it spurs acquisition.
As brands continue to optimize their on-site gifting experience, they’re uncovering another path to higher retention and loyalty. Having an offering like Zest gifting readily available gives customers a reason to choose and return to one brand over a competitor.
“I’ve seen people who are like, ‘Oh my god, this is great! I love this! It’s so much easier, I don’t even need to talk to you!’ And having Zest has had a really positive experience on our repeat customers. They send a gift once and come back to send different gifts to different people,” is just one sentiment from Flora Nishihara, director of partnerships at Dandelion Chocolate.
Customer retention and earning someone’s unwavering loyalty is the ecommerce dream. Nearly 30% of retailers see retaining and enhancing loyalty as a main priority. And with modern tech like Zest, brands have a clear pathway to increasing retention and coveted acquisition.
Recall how gifting has social and psychological impacts. Gifting something intentional is an act that inherently builds trust and strengthens bonds between gifter and giftee.
Now, layer on the idea that every time someone chooses your product as a gift, they’re putting it in the hands of a potential new customer. The recipient may have heard of your brand before or it’s possible this is their very first time hearing about it, but regardless, receiving your product from someone they trust is all the endorsement you need to get their attention.
Every gift recipient is someone who’s holding, using, tasting, or wearing your product — all without your brand dumping heaps of money into paid ads, influencers, and more with far less impact. (Plus, these recipients have also experienced your store’s optimized gifting flow first-hand, instantly flagging your brand as an awesome gifting flow in their subconscious.)
Director of marketing at Okendo, Lindsay Kolinsky, knows 2025 is the year of looking inward and creating more customer-centric strategies for retention and acquisition. “By creating a cycle where retention efforts help power your acquisition strategy, your customers ultimately become your best marketers. These ‘Superfans’ are not only more likely to have higher lifetime value themselves but are also more cost-effective than relying on traditional paid channels for acquiring new customers.”
Whether your customers are sending gifts to just one close friend or hundreds of corporate co-workers, the web of impressed giftees and hot leads grows fast. It’s only a matter of time before these curious recipients wander to your dot-com to shop for themselves or continue the gifting cycle, but there’s one way you can ratchet up customer acquisition even faster: Klaviyo.
Leverage Klaviyo to Turn Gift Recipients into Top Customers
In a 2024 survey, half of the online retail executives polled said customer acquisition was a top priority — a feat only achievable if brands understand “why people buy, what they buy, where they buy, how to most-effectively reach them, and what engagement tactics to use.”
Few platforms are more familiar with customer engagement than ecommerce powerhouse Klaviyo. With its roots deep in email marketing, the Klaviyo platform has expanded to best-in-class SMS marketing, analytics, and more. Basically, Klaviyo is a household name for anyone in the biz. It only made sense for Zest to integrate with the leading engagement platform to make the most of every gift sent.
Extended engagement is baked into the Zest gifting journey. When gifters check out, they can opt into the store’s marketing where the brand has a shot to retain them for the long haul. This isn’t anything too novel, as most ecommerce stores prompt shoppers to opt into their email list at some point or another.
But the real acquisition magic happens in the recipient experience.
When someone sends a gift through Zest, the recipients can opt to receive tracking information and marketing from a brand.
This is a revolutionary approach to online gifting. Before Zest, the brand essentially had anonymous gift recipients. This is because the tools simply didn’t exist yet to give brands insight about who’s gifting, what’s being gifted, who’s receiving gifts, and which recipients are returning to the brand and buying. The channel insight was admittedly clear as mud, but those days are now over.
Every gift recipient who opts into your marketing upon accepting a gift is primed and ready to engage with your brand in ways that weren’t possible before.
So, what exactly can gifting trigger with Klaviyo? These are some of the events from Zest that can be used to trigger powerful comms in your Klaviyo campaigns:
- Gift Order Placed
- Similar to a post-purchase email campaign (which typically see open rates >60% and click rates ~4%), use this event to trigger a thank you email for people who just purchased a gift. Consider sweetening the pot with a discount code that encourages them to gift again or get a li’l something for themselves.
- Send Gift
- When someone sends a gift, this event is triggered and is used to send gift alerts and messages to the recipient.
- Send Thank You
- One especially sweet part of Zest’s gifting experience is that recipients can send thank you notes back to the gifter upon receiving their gift notification.
- One especially sweet part of Zest’s gifting experience is that recipients can send thank you notes back to the gifter upon receiving their gift notification.
- Gift Accepted
- This event is triggered when a recipient opens and accepts a gift, then opts to receive tracking information. Give a quick intro and start warming up this new contact.
- Gift Shipper, Gift Out For Delivery, Gift Delivered
- This is your chance to gain some trust with the recipient through transparent communication about their gift as it makes its way to its final destination.
These events are crucial to automatically engaging gifters and recipients for the long run. Create separate audiences to send personalized messages and emails specific to the unique gifting journey, remind gifters of gifting anniversaries, and tell recipients about products they might like related to the gift they received.
Retaining your existing customers, acquiring new customers, and turning both into super fans who never want to gift anything but your brand requires some top-notch nurturing, but with a partnership as powerful as Klaviyo and Zest, you have this on lock.
4 Post-gifting Campaigns Using Klaviyo Email and SMS
When polled by Klaviyo, consumers said that email is the second-most influential marketing channel regarding what they buy. (Paid/organic search ranked most influential, if you’re curious.) SMS messages also have some considerable pull, ranking in the top 10 most influential channels.
So, once Zest gifting is buzzing along on your site and Klaviyo is plugged in and ready to trigger some action, we recommend whipping up these four comms first. (The rest is up to you!)
Welcome Email
Welcome emails have always been biggies, consistently accounting for high open and click rates, but these become even more valuable in regards to gifting.
Odds are good that gift recipients have never heard of your brand before. And while they have your product in hand from a gifter they trust, it’s important to introduce yourself and let them know your story. In this first non-transactional email, share your brand mission, what else you sell, and cozy up a bit to start this relationship off on the right foot.
Incentives to Gifters and Gift Recipients
While it’s best practice to avoid constantly discounting your goods and devaluing your brand perception, strategic uses of discounts and promo codes are smart.
More than half of retailers leverage discounts, and a huge 92% of consumers use them. They’re a tried-and-true tactic, and that stays the same in the realm of gifting.
We recommend rewarding your MVP gifters with incentives to gift again (and, ahem, broaden your network of potential customers) and enticing gift recipients to shop for themselves with a sweet discount. This not only shows you appreciate their opt-in, but it’s a good step to get recipients to visit your site and explore your catalog on their own.
Holiday Promotion
In ecommerce, it’s never too early to start planning your holiday campaigns. We recommend teeing up longer email sequences that start well before Black Friday and Cyber Monday and last through the new year.
These emails should spotlight the gifting features both gifters and giftees are familiar with, such as easy multiship or group gifting, instant e-gifting, gift scheduling, gift notes, and more. Whatever you think will resonate most with your audience should be featured in these messages.
Conversational
Consumers don’t love being sold to every second of the day. To make your nurturing feel like, well, nurturing, make sure to have at least one conversation message in your sequence.
Use these moments to gauge how your gift-centric audiences are feeling, what’s important to them about gifting, what they’d most looking forward to about the holidays, and beyond — just make sure to skip a hard sell. Provide value in these instances and your acquisition and retention numbers will speak for themselves.
Unleash Your Customer Acquisition Flywheel With Zest and Klaviyo
In a time when ecommerce seems more chaotic than ever, take a minute to look at the opportunities you may have been sitting on all along.
Cut through the noise, don’t sweat keeping up with The Joneses, and dig up some insight from what your unique customers are already doing. If you suspect some of these folks are gifting (and even more would be gifting your goods if the process was as easy as shopping for themselves), then invest in that trend this year.
Once you have the tools in place to make it simple for your shoppers to do some serious advocacy on your behalf, this flywheel will take care of itself.
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