Alyce Wrapped 2021 Product Recap

By Megan Pratt on January 10, 2022

What better way to ring in the new year than by taking a trip down memory lane with our Alyce Wrapped 2021 Product Recap, which highlights all the goodness we delivered to our customers this past year.

In 2021, Alyce was hard at work, creating awesome new features that help create engagement and meaningful experiences in a world where the new normal of digital inundation is creating more noise than ever in people’s lives.

This post will dive deep into every single last thing that our wicked smart (our team originated in Boston, alright?) product team has thought up as well as those suggested by our community of customers.

We’ve divided it into:

• Gifts for our Marketing Friends 
• Gifts for our Sales Allies
• Updates for all Alyce Users

Jump around to what sounds interesting to you, or read the whole thing if you’re a huge fan of Alyce (which we hope you are). 

Gifts for our Marketing Friends

It’s time to say goodbye to some old marketing ways.

Au revoir to the months of painstaking work to craft static campaigns.

Adios to the days that you can ignore your customer’s #5to9™ life.

Sayonara to tracking everything in a copy of a copy of a copy of an excel spreadsheet.

For our marketing friends, we focused this year on not just leveraging the Alyce platform to provide the right gifts at the right time but making sure those experiences fit in seamlessly with your campaigns.

Our Alyce Wrapped 2021 Product Recap explains how:

Create more consistency across channels with customized brand styling

Imagine this: you spend hours selecting a gift that’s perfect for the campaign yet when your sales team references the gift on a call, the prospect answers “oh that was from you?”

Worst. Nightmare. Ever.

We say no more!

With the new customization features launched last year in Alyce, you can make each and every experience on point with customized branding for your gift redemption pages. It’s never been easier to create gift redemption pages to match your company branding, customize a team gift initiative, or make a special campaign or event stand out.

Marketers love a good theme

Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson said that the key to success is consistency. 

Make your campaigns more consistent and successful like The Rock with Alyce’s Custom Marketplaces (a sentence we never thought we’d say).

As we wrote last year on our blog, making your marketing campaigns cohesive, on-brand and on-theme are non-negotiables. 

Alyce helps you effortlessly create and curate gifting marketplaces that are precisely the products you want to align with your campaign theme and brand.

SWAG – Stuff We All Get (and now love!)

Many of the changes over the last two years driven by the pandemic are here to stay. 

That includes people’s expectations that interactions with a company feel the same online as they would have in person.

With our new branded product, kitting, warehousing, and fulfillment services, Alyce unifies the physical and digital gifting experiences in a way that is unmatched in the industry. Full stop.

Driving marketing-sales alignment with marketing-led gifting

Unicorns. The Lochness Monster. Marketing-Sales alignment. 

Mythological creatures all. 

Or are they?

With Alyce’s new marketing-led gifting capabilities, marketers can now gift on behalf of their sellers, bringing your revenue-focused teams closer together by putting both marketing and sales on the same page with common activities.

Gifts for our Sales Allies

We’ve all heard it over and over that “people buy from people”. These words have never been more true than today where we’re all feeling a little disconnected. A bit of humanity goes a long way, after all.

At Alyce, we believe putting the person first, front, and center isn’t just smart, it’s the best path toward creating more opportunities and deeper relationships.

This year we’ve optimized the Alyce platform to provide our sales friends with less friction, more intelligence, and useful integrations that tie directly into their sales processes and tech. Continue reading our Alyce Wrapped 2021 Product Recap to see what we mean:

Introducing Gift Links for more ways to reach out

Gifting using Alyce had been a binary choice: email or physical delivery.

But what if you have better luck in Twitter DMs or LinkedIn In-Mails? Well now if you can put an Alyce Gift Link there and anywhere else you can think of.

Slack message? Put a gift in it.

MySpace message? Ummm…you know what, sure! You do you. Put a Gift Link in there too. Say hi to Tom while you’re at it.

You can find out the full list of ways you can use these Gift Links here.

Reduce small talk with Alyce Assist

Real talk: 

Small talk is not building rapport, no matter how much you bond over those rainy Seattle days or unpredictable Boston nor’easters.

But trying to build your small talk up to medium talk and get a bit of insight into your prospect before your conversation can be hard to do. 

Enter Alyce Assist. This new feature helps cut out the small talk while building personal bonds and staying organized. A comprehensive overview is emailed to you just before your call so you can feel confident running your prospect meeting

And if you find out they are a storm chaser in their free time, by all means, talk about the weather. But then and only then.

Get ahead of the game with Scheduled Gifting

I can barely remember to water my plants on time, never mind trying to balance the activities and tasks most sales reps are asked to keep on top of each day. 

With so many deals in various stages, prospecting, meetings, follow-ups…it’s nice when you can get ahead of the game.

That’s why we added Scheduled Gifting so you can cross at least ONE thing off your to-do list early.

Gifting incorporated within your Salesforce workflow

According to 2020 research, Zoominfo says that “Companies use an average of 75 technologies, with the amount going up as the number of employees increases”.

So if your sales team is spending more time trying to figure out what apps to use and when their workflow is going to be severely disrupted in turn.

Alyce’s integration with Salesforce allows salespeople to gift in their daily workflows, building bonds and driving engagement with new accounts without interruption. In May of 2021, our integration was certified by Salesforce to be listed in the Salesforce AppExchange.

Alyce + Salesloft = streamlined multi-channel outreach

Salesloft preaches a data-driven and automated multi-channel approach. 

Similar to the situation with Salesforce, if leveraging multiple channels takes users out of their normal workflow and has them leapfrogging from system to system, that’s precious time that’s not spent doing what salespeople do best: selling.

Last year, Alyce also announced an integration with Salesloft allowing users to have steps to send gifts integrated right into their cadences.

Read more about how Salesloft themselves aligns 50% more reps with their strategic marketing programs using Alyce.

 

Gifts for Everyone

And lastly, there were improvements we made that all teams could enjoy:

With our new Help Center, we’re more helpful than ever

At Alyce, we’re in an interesting position. 

We are not only responsible for delivering top-notch support to our customers…

…but our customer’s customers as well.

So yeah, you can say that being personal in every aspect of our support is personal to us.

That’s why we took a new look at how we help everyone who interacts with our support team by building a robust knowledge center and launching a live chat feature so our customers can get help the way they want it when they need it.

We went across the pond (that’s how you say it, right?)

Last but not least, we formally announced the rollout of Alyce digital gifting internationally!

That means you can now create recipient-centric digital gift experiences for your prospects globally: 

• Australia
• Austria
• Belgium
• Canada
• Denmark
• Finland
• France
• Germany
• Ireland
• India
• Italy
• Luxemburg
• Mexico 
• Netherlands 
• Poland
• Portugal 
• Sweden
• Switzerland 
• Spain
• Singapore 
• UK, and
• United States

That’s a wrap

Whew. You made it through our Alyce Wrapped 2021 Product Recap. I know that was a lot to digest but if you take away one thing it’s this:

Adding Alyce to your workflow means you have complete freedom to deliver gifting moments that create a truly differentiated experience for your customers.

And we’re not calling it a day in 2022.

If you’ve got a hankering for more Alyce features, check out our upcoming session of Alyce Unwrapped at the end of January, where we’ll be covering new features recently delivered within Alyce’s B2B gifting platform.