A good way to generate more business is always by getting some decent quality promotional printed products sourced and getting them out to your customers.

But, promotional printed products do not need to cost you a penny and in these harder times that can be great news. You just need to apply a little logic in your promotional activities.

Random Giveaways Are Not Best
The obvious way to use promotional printed products is to stand there and just give them out to anyone and everyone. But, whilst this can be effective, there is the cost of sourcing the items to consider.

Instead, look at ways of covering the cost of getting your keyrings, toys, stress balls or whatever printed and over to your distribution point.

Create More Sales
And the way to do this is to instead of just handing them out to ever passing potential customer that goes past, using them to tempt in new customers and to temp existing customers to come back or buy more.

Drag People In With Promotional Giveaways
If you own a shop, then along with the items have some big posters created that shout out exactly what you are offering for free, but with a catch. For example, “Free stress ball with all purchases over £10 tomorrow.”. This way, you are drawing the people into your shop and encouraging them to spend money with you and this becomes instant profit.

This giving them out in return for a purchase is much more cost effective than just giving them out and hoping for a sale in return, and can be used on websites. The poster in the shop can even tie in to an online promotion, so that the shop promotion encourages people to visit and buy from your website.

Increase Average Sales
But this is not the only way of encouraging direct sales. There is another way, if a little complicated at first to understand.

Take a look at how much your average customer spends with you in a single basket, and this works in a shop or online (but work out the averages separately). Now add a little amount onto that average and see how many customers are spending that much. Aim to find a figure that only the top 30 – 40% of customers are spending in a basket.

Now offer the promotional gift for free, when a customer spends more than this target basket figure. What you are doing here is rewarding the best customers whilst trying to persuade those average customers to spend a little more, which means more profit.

This is excellent add on marketing and it is so easy to tell if it is working – just work out again the average basket value and the top 30 / 40% figure and see what has happened. If your average basket has gone up, then you know that people are tempted and are going for your offer and it is working.

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