Gifting To Customers

I was speaking to an IT support guy who wanted to increase his business.

His plan was to print and post a load of leaflets. He expected at best 1% response rate. At 32 pence for a stamp, plus leaflet printing, packing etc, he could be looking at £40 per response.

His leaflet was getting an absolute hammering for style, impact etc. So I suggested how about targeting existing customers - making sure they come back and aiming for them to pass on referrals - which is my own business model.

My suggestion was a cheap promotional mousemat. Every time he works on a computer leave a mouse mat or two behind. The one I suggested costs from only 55p. So for about the price of 150 leaflets - enough maybe to get one phone call in, he could have 100 mouse mats. No distribution costs, just leave one with every customer.

What are the benefits? Well, for a start, you are giving the customer something extra. Don't free gifts always go down a treat?

When in a few weeks or months the computers need a bit of TLC - where's your number? Right under their hand. Who are they likely to call? And what when a friend, colleague or associate asks who to recommend? Well your number has been on their desk under their hand.

Maybe distributing 100 mouse mats to existing customers won't bring in the business as fast as sending thousands of leaflets out, but in a few weeks the leaflets are probably recycled. But hopefully the mouse mats are still sitting on the desks. Which is going to bring in most business - 100 mousemats or 1 or 2 phone calls from leaflets?

Encouraging Customers To Look At Your Gift Items

What else can be done to ensure that potential customers pick up & take home you promotional items? You want them to - that's why you have had them printed. It's no good spending hundreds of pounds on promotional material if the target audience aren't interested in the items.

With the Printed Mouse Mats what I suggested to the customer is that he passed me pictures of several of his main speakers along with their signatures and we'd have a grid of speakers printed.

This would be an excellent souvenir of the night out and I can easily imagine plenty of people picking them up and taking them home. It's not hard to imagine several of them taking the mouse mats into work the next day to use there - to show off about the speakers they saw the night before.

In this case there's a good chance that work colleagues will also see the promotional goods - and there's a chance that at some point in the future one of them would want to arrange a night and remember the mouse mat.

That's the way these goods can work. Sounds a bit if and maybe, but when you are talking about thousands of mouse mats being sent out, there's a good chance of many things happening.

Promotional Printed Mousemats

A Promotional Mousemat is an excellent tool with many marketing uses. The Brite Mat is cheap and excellent for use with an optical mouse.

From only 88p per unit, when ordering 500 or more, it's well worth looking at what else you can use it for.

The most obvious use would be just to get a batch printed and hand them out to customers. But here's a lot better way to use some Printed Mousemats.

Simply get together with a few similar businesses - but not any that compete with you. Say 8 or 10, including yourself, but from 4 will easily do. Then design a mousemat that includes all of your logos and get 100 printed each.

Now, every time that you or one of the other businesses hands out a mat, it becomes a potential advert for all of you.