Freebies, Bonuses, Surprise Gifts … the customers love them

I was at the World Internet Summit for 4 days. The most talked about topics were traffic generation, sales conversion and irresistible offers. What is an irresistible offer? Basically, it is such a good deal that you will not want to walk away from it. And if you did, you would forever lament the great loss you incurred by doing so.

For the internet marketers who sell e-information, their freebies, bonuses and mystery gifts would also be e-information, be it an ebook or software. For the offline marketers, the preferred choice would be a physical product that customers can see, feel, touch, smell or hear.

Selecting an appropriate gift is critical. You must know whether this is for upsell, cross-sell or even a down-sell. You must decide if your target audience will fall in love with this gift. You must ascertain that you have enough budget to get sufficient quantities of the gift so that it can last at least half, if not the entire, campaign period. After you worked out the strategy, you need to look for THAT gift. What do you do? Where do you start looking?

Finding a company that provides an elegant solution to promotional marketing is easy. You can use the Yellow Pages or Google/Yahoo/Live Search. The challenge is to find the right company that will consult you on your choice to match your marketing campaign. The odds are, you will get lots of pushy salesmen that simply want you to get the new keychain their company just launched. Your don’t want just another logo promotional product. You want a gift item that your customers can relate to, or you would want something that is used with your product. If you are selling coffee, a coffee mug with a logo is a nice logo promotional product. Find a company that bothers to understand the nature of your marketing campaign, target audience, budget and delivery deadline. This last component is very important as many gift items are now produced in developing countries. Shipment takes time.

What I would suggest is for you to look for a reputable company, like GDN. I was particularly impressed with the testimonials. I counted more than twenty. With comments from world renowned financial institutions like Credit Suisse, Citigroup, JP Morgan, Bank of America, I would expect GDN to offer high quality goods, excellent customer service and support, reasonable price and timely delivery. After being in the industry for so long, I have learnt that paying a little more for a reputable company can be a real warm security blanket. There is no nightmare of rejected goods or late deliveries. This is especially critical as the promotional gift could be the final piece towards making your almost perfect campaign complete.

Remember, I had used the McDonald’s Wedding Day Hello Kitty example in my previous post to demonstrate the importance of a gift. Sometimes the gift is more important than the core product.

So for offline marketers who need to look for a gift, make sure you plan. Do not succumb to budget or smooth talking salesman. Always tie your gift to your corporate branding, core product, target audience, and marketing campaign theme.

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[tags]corporate gift, promotional gift, logo promotional product[/tags]