Using Promotional Items To Drive Transactions

Promotional products have long been a great way to connect with prospects and customers. Weather a office focused products like ballpoint pens, click pens, padfolios, USB flash drives, or everyday items like apparel or drinkware, companies have found many ways to apply promotional products to their marketing efforts.

Through ASI studies, we know that promotional products generate awareness, stronger associations and greater likelihood to engage with the brands that pass them out. But, what about connecting the items to actual sales?

Consider promotional items that get attention, but also drive transaction? New business, repeat customers, referrals? When we think of promotional items, we generally think about the logo, maybe a website or a phone number. But what about an offer? Here are some ideas about how that can work.

USB flash drive credit card style with a coupon / bar code imprinted on it will give people reason to keep it as their primary USB, carry it with them (they fit into wallets and purse easily) and gives you additional exposure. Load up your bulk flash drives with product images and information and you have a full fledged catalog with built in promotion.

Branded power banks, sometimes called powersticks, are seen everywhere. One of the challenges promotional marketers face is the replace-ability of the item… if everyone has one, do they need another? In this case, usually yes. But, what if you can make your branded power bank the user’s primary power bank? Cool designs, better features are certainly one way to do this. Another way for retail outlets is to imprint an offer or coupon code on the power bank. This will get them to use it more (getting exposure to their peers) and draw them into your store (or online).

Willing to get a little more adventuresome, try promotional t-shirts with a special offer? It will have to be a cool design, something they will like wearing. But if you incorporate an offer, you can increase repeat business. You might even try something like “the day of the week t-shirt”. Everyone with the t-shirt who shows up on a certain day of the week gets a special deal. Use your imagination and you’ll come up with a bunch of fun ways to use apparel to drive transactions.

Depending on the item and the decorating options, you may be able to ‘serialize’ the imprinting, giving each item a unique number or code. When you go to events and you know that you passed out items from 1-150, and then at another event 151-500, you can then keep track of which even generated the most revenue. You can even see which code make repeat purchases and learn about their behavior. This kind of application bring promotional marketing tracking to the level of digital!

Of course, contact an iPromo promotional expert for more ideas or with help implementing you own.