Promotional giveaways and customer gifts are proven marketing methods. However, there are a host of aspects that marketers tend to overlook when implementing these marketing incentives. Promotional giveaways should be more than just a tacky gimmick. To get the most marketing power out of these gifts, you’ll need to institute features like desirable items and a streamlined registration system. With these tips, convert more customers through effective promotions.
Make the most of your marketing data
Promotional giveaways and customer gifts are a staple of modern marketing for a reason. Ninety-two percent of marketers employ these tools and another 66.8% use multiple platforms to do so. That’s because, in the course of customer outreach, promotions offer business benefits like:
- Generating leads
- Creating collaboration opportunities
- Building a sense of community
- Enhancing brand awareness
These are boons that every marketer wants as they develop strong campaigns. The good news is that implementing promotional giveaways can be substantially aided by your marketing data. In fact, considering customer data is one of the best strategies you can employ as you develop marketing promotions.
That’s because customer data informs everything from niche customer interests to the success of previous campaigns. By leveraging this data to create customer personas, you make it easier to put yourself in their shoes. From here, choosing an effective prize incentive is easy. Simply ask yourself what your target audience might want, then assess their feedback.
However, once you’ve decided on an incentive for your promotional campaign, you need to clarify the details.
Clarify rules, time frames, and prizes
Ensuring the success of your marketing promotion requires attention to detail. Specifically, this detail is important at the customer education stage. All sorts of unusual ways to market your business can find success, from trade show swag to charity donations. However, if your promotions aren’t clear and interesting to your customers, you won’t achieve nearly the level of engagement you are going for.
This begins with the rules. For any kind of promotion, the details shouldn’t be relegated to hard-to-read fine print. Instead, make entrance easy and clear with a helpful FAQ or an informational page. Customers should understand immediately what they have to do to qualify for the promotion. Then, they shouldn’t have to wait too long to find out what and if they won.
This requires a clearly established time frame as well as defined prices. A good rule of thumb for setting promotional schedules is to plan them between two and four weeks long. This timeframe can encourage engagement without going so long that customers forget about it altogether.
From here, it’s necessary to define gifts based on their explicit value to customers. This means transparent descriptions of branded client gifts guaranteed to attract interest. Fortunately, there are plenty of affordable choices for these gifts. Use your marketing data to decide on desirable incentives for your customers, including but not limited to:
- Tote bags
- Baked goods
- Office supplies
- Charity donations
These gifts can lead to greater customer interest, but only if the descriptions are transparent and accurate. Your promotion will likely blow up in your face if you give customers false expectations.
That said, ensure your incentives are clearly and logically planned out from the beginning. As part of this process, streamline the ways that customers can register for the promotion that lend to transparency and understanding.
Streamline the registration process
An easy registration process is vital for promotional success. That’s because whatever interest you might garner from an incentive can be negated by difficult registration. If customers find the process unclear, misleading, or predatory, any gains in marketing power will be lost.
Instead, make registration for the promotion as simple as possible. Qualifiers should ideally be tied to a digital checkout process to keep the experience automated, while physical retail incentives should come with very few qualifying hoops for customers to jump through.
For instance, forcing customers to fill out a form is clunky and inefficient. Seventy-four percent of consumers hate filling out forms for these reasons. Registration for promotion should instead be as automatic as possible. The customer completes a simple task and they are automatically registered for entry.
Luckily for marketers, a variety of software tools and plugins makes it easy to automate these experiences. By connecting platforms like social media with marketing systems, marketers can then create rules for what they would like their promotion to do. Then, success is just a matter of customer outreach.
Win customers
Incentives and promotions are great ways to boost brand awareness. Customers like them, employees like them, and new leads will come to like them as you branch out into new territory. Since everyone likes winning something, your chief concern will be to make these promotional gifts as desirable as possible while eliminating barriers to entry.
Start by exploring your customer data, then implement a clear and streamlined registration process. With the rules understood, customers are free to flock to your promotion with little risk and plenty of rewards. These tips can help you make the most out of marketing promotions as you look to win customers in the new year.
