Jeremy Chen
It’s no surprise that promotional products give marketers the benefit of a low cost per impression, increasing overall brand awareness and customer loyalty.
Building on this, the next coherent step is to think of creative ways to use promotional merchandise to drive real revenue and sales. If your investment in branded merchandise makes a direct impact on your business bottom line, you know you’ve made a wise choice!
At the outset, you should decide what your sales goal is. It’s best to begin with the end in the mind, so you can work your way back to which promotional products you need, how you’ll distribute them and also calculate your estimated ROI. As they say whatever gets measured, gets managed.
So for example, you may decide that your goal is to increase sales by 10%, for which you’ve got a budget of $5,000 to invest in promotional products. Then, you should know your current sales, your expected sales revenue, and the timeline within which you’re expecting your goal to materialise. This is a great way to begin with clarity and set an intention.
In this post, we’ll give you 2 concrete ways to use promotional products to drive sales. You’ll learn the art of using promotional products to generate leads, initiate quality sales conversations and win new customers to grow your business. We’ll also give you some examples to demonstrate how it all works!
So without further adieu, let’s begin!
Method 1: Distribute Personalised Relevant Promotional Products With A Call To Action
The silver bullet to increasing sales is having a great product, and a great relationship with your customers. Personalisation is one way of improving customer relationships by making customers feel special.
Through customising promotional products, you instantly create the foundation for building a good relationship with your customers. You wow your customers by showing them you care. This strategy is particularly useful for bigger ticket sales, where the lifetime value of a customer is large enough to offset the cost of personalising the promotional products you give. It’s also more relevant in a B2B context, or for businesses that sell luxury products or services to end consumers.
You need to always think from the customers perspective, especially when your relationships determine your business success. Personalization needs to be accompanied by a ‘soft call to action’ so your customers know how to get in touch with you should they need you.
We’ve seen this strategy being used quite effectively among wealth managers working at banks who manage relationships with HNIs (High Net Worth Individuals), as well as other businesses.
As an example, 3M, a well known global science company that continues to invent products, wanted to boost sales of disposable respirators. They targeted their network of distributors by sending them a personalised direct mail with a sample respirator, along with a related promotional product. It was a clear piggy bank that read “We want you to breathe through your nose, not pay through your nose.” 3M also sent a keychain, sunglasses and an embroidered hat to their distributors to be on their good books, along with a call to action.
The strategy worked well boosting sales of the disposable respirator product line by 20%. Through promotional product personalization, backed by a clearly established goal at the outset, the were able to make their promotional product campaign a huge success.
Including a call to action on your promotional products is a great way to generate leads, as customers will refer to it while using them. For instance, every pen that National Australia Bank gives away has a phone number customers can call them on. This makes it easy for prospects to get in contact with the bank, whenever they need to.
By adding a call tracking number on your promotional products, it also makes it easier to monitor the number of leads you’re generating, and the quality and quantity of sales conversations that are being held.
Method 2: Distribute Premium Promotional Products When Customers Make Purchases, While Incentivising Referrals
Another effective approach to boosting sales directly with promotional products is to create different levels of promotional products. You could have cheaper, free, easy to distribute promotional products at the bottom level, and the more expensive, premium promotional products at the top level.
Make sure your premium promotional products are highly attractive to your customers. You want them to be excited by it! You can induce the sale of your actual product(s) by attaching the premium promotional product as a free giveaway when the customer buys your actual products.
You might wonder why you’d do that!
Interestingly, there are products that customers don’t always want to buy, but have to buy. Think medicines, or car lubricants. These aren’t exactly products that you enjoy talking about, but, if you got a reward to buy them, you’d be extrinsically motivated to buy them.
Applying this strategy to a pharmaceutical company, imagine if Blackmores gave you free multivitamins with every purchase a smart weighing scale. You’d feel more motivated to buy their fish oil because you’d get free multivitamins to improve your health! And multivitamins aren’t cheap. This would naturally boost the sales of smart weighing scales at Blackmores, compared to other pharmacies that don’t give any promotional products on purchasing a weighing scale.
The sales boost doesn’t end there. Blackmores could increase sales even more by incentivising referrals if you referred your friends to buy smart weighing scales from them. Using branded promotional products as a way to incentivise referrals is a great strategy to reward referral partners and create recurring referral relationships that continue to drive sales for your business.
Make your premium promotional giveaways something that resonates with your customers at a deeper emotional level. For instance, you could give eco friendly promotional products to customers who are environmentally conscious, or multivitamins to health conscious folks and so on.
Creating some scarcity around your premium promotional giveaways so people don’t want to ‘lose out’ on your offer, and you’ll notice how they’ll act faster to make a purchase.
Wrapping It Up
Use strategies that make it easy to link your promotional product campaign efforts with your sales. This will allow you to justify your investment in promotional products while also using them as the ‘hook’ to get customers to contact you. Then, create viral referral loops to keep customers coming back to your business, and you’ll be on your way to sales heaven.
Reach out to Good Things to explore how we can help with your promotional product needs.
