Promotional gift giving is the magic ingredient in any marketing mix and is a crucial part of customer relationship management.

However, care must be taken to choose the right gifts to suit the level of business contact. Spend too much and it could look a bribe; too little and it may appear that you don’t care enough. Categorising contacts will help you decide how to choose the appropriate level of promotional gifts:

Existing customers Existing customers are where the majority of your business comes from, with the least effort. Keeping these customers happy is of utmost importance so that the relationship can develop and you can make sure you don’t lose the customer to a competitor. Gift type: reward. Gift level: top range.Referrers Generally they won’t use your services but they are prolific recommendation makers. A referral is hundreds of times more effective than any advertisement. Referrers should therefore be rewarded every time they refer a good quality lead. Gift type: reward. Gift level: high.Prospective customers and referrers Not yet a part of your customer or referrer base, but you want them to be. You want to entice them to recommend or buy from you. If they are the type of prospect that would make a lucrative customer or referrer, then good quality, medium range promotional gifts should be chosen, although care should be taken to ensure it doesn’t appear you are bribing them to do business with you. Gift type: incentive. Gift level: medium.Using promotional gifts is an effective way to gain and maintain business contacts, develop and nurture relationships and encourage more business and referrals. However, care should be taken when choosing gifts so that they don’t over or understate your message.

 

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 15th, 2007 at 9:51 am and is filed under Promotional Gifts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.