There are several excellent reasons to focus on ways to improve customer loyalty, whether you are running a large multinational corporation or a small, strictly local concern. For a start, loyal customers spend more money and can help reduce your annual marketing costs. Your most loyal customers will also act as highly effective brand advocates, helping to spread the word far and wide. For these reasons alone, customer loyalty is highly prized. But how can we build customer loyalty fast without spending millions of dollars on prime-time advertising campaigns in the process? One of the most effective ways to build customer loyalty, which we discuss in detail below, is through the distribution of promotional products.
What are promotional products?
Before we discuss specific strategies that can be employed to build customer loyalty with promotional products, let’s define what these products are. A promotional product is any product given away or sold at a competitive price to promote your company or one of its brands, products or services. Promotional products are mostly given to prospective and existing customers of an organisation, but they may sometimes be given away to suppliers or business partners as well.
Promotional products are sometimes referred to as branded gifts, corporate giveaways, corporate gifts or similar. The terminology is not important. What matters is they are a very effective weapon in the battle for customer loyalty. Now we are all working from the same page, let’s discuss specific strategies and ideas.
Strategies for building customer loyalty quickly with promotional products
- Send branded birthday gifts – Assuming that you retain personal details on file for your regular customers, sending branded birthday gifts to each one could be an excellent way to build customer loyalty. Branded pens, diaries, tote bags, baseball caps and many other similar promotional products have been used in birthday gift campaigns with great success, so there is no need to spend a fortune on luxury items. When a customer receives a birthday gift from your organisation, they’ll be touched that you remembered their special day. The precise nature of the gift will be of secondary concern.
Whatever type of promotional products you use as birthday gifts for your customers, we recommend sending a handwritten note with each one. This will make the whole experience even more personal and enjoyable for the recipient, which is the primary objective of this particular strategy. A note of caution: whilst there is no need to buy high-ticket items to send to your customers on their birthdays, we would not recommend sending gifts of so little value as to make them seem almost offensive.
- Seasonal gifts – Christmas, Easter, and other festive occasions offer further opportunities to use promotional products as gifts for your customers. As with birthday gifts, it is not necessary to use luxury items. However, we urge you to focus your attention on promotional products that are likely to be useful at the relevant time of year. For example, at Christmas, you might like to give a simple cheese serving dish to your most loyal customers or perhaps a calendar for the New Year. The more useful your branded gifts are, the more they will be used, increasing the exposure your brand, company logo or marketing slogan receives.
In our experience, Christmas is one of the best times to send promotional products as seasonal gifts to your customers. Friends and relatives gather in large groups to celebrate this festive occasion, which means extra exposure for your branded gifts. The seasonal bonhomie that reigns at this time of the year also ensures a warm reception for well-chosen gifts.
- Customer loyalty programs – Festive occasions and birthdays are great opportunities to build loyalty with promotional products, but they are rather inflexible as far as dates are concerned. If you are looking for ways to build customer loyalty, through the giving of branded products at times of your choosing, incorporating them into an existing customer loyalty programme is an excellent place to start. If you do not already have a customer loyalty programme, consider putting that right as soon as possible.
The best way to use promotional products in a customer loyalty programme will depend on the type of business you are running and the market sector in which you operate. If, for example, you are running a manufacturing operation, supplying wholesalers and larger retailers, you may like to present promotional gifts to customers who reach a certain volume of sales or have been with you for a certain time. If you are running a retail operation, you could allow customers to redeem their loyalty card points for promotional products in your store or stores.
As there is an almost endless variety of ways to use promotional products as part of customer loyalty programmes, whether for wholesale or retail customers, it is worth doing some research before you get started.
- Limited edition products – One of the most innovative ways to use promotional products you might like to consider is the release of limited editions of certain products, to generate interest in the gifts themselves as well as in your organisation and what it has to offer. A good example of limited edition promotional giveaways in the hospitality industry is the toys that children receive in their McDonald’s Happy Meals. Not only are they of interest as collectible items in themselves and help to remind people of what McDonald’s has to offer, but they also directly encourage the purchase of more Happy Meals. While your own business may have very little in common with a fast food chain, it’s such an effective use of promotional products it may still inspire your marketing team.
If you don’t know where to start with limited-edition promotional products, we recommend trying a few simple ideas first. If you currently use baseball caps as promotional gifts, you could try some limited runs in special colours to see if they generate additional interest in your organisation. Another idea worth trying is the presentation of engraved gifts to mark special occasions or corporate milestones. A set of cut glass tumblers engraved with the relevant dates could make a great gift to mark a significant corporate anniversary for example. While limited-edition branded gifts are most suitable for retail industry applications, they have been used with varying degrees of success in other settings.
- Souvenirs – One of the industries in which promotional products can be used to great effect is the travel and hospitality industry. A free souvenir of a holiday in a charming hotel will evoke pleasant memories that could significantly increase the chances of repeat business in certain cases. While you would need to do market research and testing to confirm whether this is the case for your hospitality industry business, the enormous potential of promotional products in this industry makes them well worth further investigation. Imagine a beautifully decorated tote bag presented as a gift to guests when they check out of your hotel: something they can use daily that will always make them smile. Or perhaps a monogrammed pen would be more in keeping with the style of your establishment? Whatever type of promotional products you choose, a key factor to bear in mind is whether they are likely to be useful to your customers. As with the Christmas gifts we discussed earlier, the more useful your souvenirs prove to be, the more exposure they will provide your organisation.
Souvenir promotional products can also be used by other travel and hospitality industry businesses, including airlines, train companies, places of interest and theme parks. Whatever type of business you are running in this industry, there is an excellent chance you could promote it with branded gifts.
- Gift With Purchase campaigns – A tried and tested way to encourage impulse buys in stores across the world, Gift With Purchase campaigns can also be an effective vehicle through which branded gifts can be distributed to verified consumers of your products. A good example of a branded Gift With Purchase campaign are branded reusable coffee cups paired with packs of coffee beans. The cups can be used every day by your customers and will most likely be seen by quite a few friends and relatives over time. In addition to serving as a constant reminder of the brand name, the cups help make customers feel more valued, which in turn makes them more loyal.
If you think of a closely associated promotional gift that could be distributed with your products, we recommend testing your idea on a small scale before launching a major campaign. Although promotional product campaigns are relatively inexpensive compared to most other types of conventional marketing campaigns, you could lose a significant sum of money if you don’t do your homework.
Gift With Purchase campaigns also have some potential in B2B settings, but in most cases, the unit costs will be much higher than for retail campaigns.
These are just a few of the more obvious promotional product strategies you may like to try for your organisation. There are many other ways promotional products can be used to build customer loyalty but because they can often be specific to certain market sectors, we won’t discuss them here. Instead, we are going to conclude with our top tips for organisations and individuals planning their very first customer loyalty/promotional products campaign.
Our top tips for devising a successful promotional products campaign
If you would like to maximise the chances of your first campaign being an unqualified success, try these top tips:
- Make it personal if possible – If you are planning a B2B campaign for high-value customers, never forget the personal touch, as it can be so effective. If you are giving away branded baseball caps in a theme park there is little scope to personalise the experience for customers but when rewarding your most valued business partners, it pays to think carefully about what each one would most like to receive.
- Make it relevant to the time of year – Whether you are planning a seasonal gift campaign for Christmas, the long summer holidays or spring, it is a good idea to choose promotional products that are relevant to the time of year. By doing so, you create a reason for giving the gift in the first place, which can help avoid any potential awkwardness. More relevant gifts are also more likely to be used, as we previously mentioned.
- Make it fit your brand or corporate image – This is something that so many organisations have failed to consider in the past, yet it is a crucial factor that can make or break a customer loyalty campaign based on promotional products. If for example you are promoting your legal firm, then branded baseball caps might not be the most suitable choice of product. On the other hand, if you are promoting a travel agency or a sports equipment supplier, they could be the perfect choice. The more closely your promotional gifts complement your brand image and identity, the more effective they are likely to be.
- Consider your budget before you start – One of the easiest ways to ruin a promotional products campaign is to run out of money halfway through. For this reason, we urge you to consider your budget carefully before you start planning in earnest. You need to know how much money is available for the entire campaign before you can start planning it in any detail.
If you are looking for more tips on how to devise an effective customer loyalty campaign using promotional products, please do not hesitate to contact the team at Branded Products®. We help companies in all industries to build customer loyalty.
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