Many businesses are finding life hard at the moment and are finding that they need to be looking at what they can do to build up their levels of traffic and their customer bases. Whether you are a website measuring hits or a shop measuring footfall through the front door, it’s the measure of traffic that shows how busy you are. Without people arriving in your shop or visiting your website, you are going to find there’s no-one about to buy your products.
It is also essential in these hard times to ensure that your current customers return to you as loyal customers and that they keep buying from you and not your direct opposition. Once you have got a customer in to visit you, make sure that they come back again. That can be far easier than finding new customers. And this is where giveaway promotional items can help, realistically.
Well, presumably they are happy with your services and then you have started to build a bit of a positive reputation with them. You also have them visiting you in one way or another and maybe even have their contact details. It’s far easier to hit them with marketing material directly, then marketing at them through press adverts and other media.
How can you make this happen? The answer can be quite simple – some giveaway promotional items. Simply get some promotional items produced and see how many ways you can distribute them.
It may be that you have an address book of existing customers and can go through the addresses and send them a mousemat, calendar or diary printed with your contact details. This has brought in plenty of repeat customers for one business I work with – some of whom had forgotten he existed until they received their mousemats.
If you are a shop and aren’t storing lists of customers’ addresses, then personalized promotional gifts such as keyrings, pens and other cheap items that you can drop into customers’ bags as they checkout can be used equally effectively. You should be looking at personalising an item that the customer is likely to want to keep, so that when they find it they put it somewhere safe and your business name is on their mind for a while. Hopefully, by the time the pen or whatever runs out, they have been back and bought again. In doing so they are reinforcing their buying relationship from you and there’s a second chance to give them a promotional freebie.
For website owners, this can be a lot harder. If you are not dealing face to face with your customers the idea of promotional gifts can seem more daunting. But there are a load of even better uses! Try offering a promotional gift in return for signing up to a newsletter and watch the newsletter signups increase. This is a great way of increasing the circulation list for your newsletter, which in turn should increase the sales it produces.
There’s plenty of promotional items out there to use and give away to customers and prospective customers. Have a look at what is available and let your imagination run wild as to how you can make sure that these items find your target audience!
Think about cheap promotional mugs and never forget to improve your online selling tips.
