B2B Marketing Promotions

Promotional incentives are a powerful marketing lever that brand advertisers can use to engage and excite consumers. They play a key role in launching new products, lifting sales of existing products, and cultivating customer loyalty. From the smallest “mom and pop” retail stores to the largest brands in the world, promotional incentives encourage people to experience products they might otherwise ignore.

Creative Ways To Leverage Promotional Incentives

Giving away free items is one of the most effective ways to stimulate a response from your target market. Nothing excites consumers more than the chance to receive something with a high perceived value for free. There are a variety of ways in which you can use free promotional incentives to motivate your audience to take action.

You can give your customers something for free in exchange for trying a new product or service. For example, Starbucks recently launched their Via brand of instant coffee and used promotional incentives to spearhead the effort. They organized a Via Taste Challenge to entice customers to try their instant brew. Customers in the Los Angeles area were asked to order a cup of Via. In return, they received a coupon that could be redeemed for any cup of coffee in the future.

You can also use promotional incentives to create a surge in sales volume around your brand. For example, Estée Lauder launched a promotion in October 2009 called “Your Beauty. Your Style. Your Profile.” They invited women to visit participating counters and receive a free makeover and photo. The photos were emailed to women so they could be uploaded easily to dating and social networking sites. The Estée Lauder logo was in the background of each photo, strengthening their brand.

Using Promotional Incentives To Collect Customer Information

In the Estée Lauder example, the promotional incentives were emailed to women who received makeovers. That means in order to receive their digital photo, women had to provide a working email address. This mechanism helped Estée Lauder to create a database of customers to whom they could market their products in the future. For example, they can email these customers a targeted holiday promotion focusing on the products that were used during the makeovers.

Mobile promotions such as music download promotions can offer this same advantage. When consumers visit your customized landing page to download your promotional incentives (e.g. free music downloads), you can require them to provide their contact information. In doing so, you’ll build a database of customers for future marketing campaigns.

The Advantage Of Delivering Promotional Incentives Online

When your promotional incentives are delivered online, your expenses are limited to whatever it costs to fulfill redemption. For example, suppose you’re offering free music downloads to people who spend $70 at a certain clothing store. Provide a website address and promo code on their purchase receipt that directs them to your download site. They can redeem your promotional incentives online, which helps to minimize your costs while exposing customers to your brand and products.

Or, suppose you want to deliver a “buy three and get one free” promotion to customers’ mobile devices. The cost of delivery is practically zero. The same is true for launching instant win games, skins promotions, offering free ringtones, and other digital promotional incentives. While the cost is low compared to traditional advertising channels, the impact on your audience is high.

Why Promotional Incentives Are Effective

Brand sponsors realized long ago that promotional incentives were a potent trigger for stimulating a response from their market. Each year, billions of dollars are spent to launch promotions that improve brand awareness, drive traffic and sales, and strengthen customer loyalty.

The reason promotional incentives are so effective is because people always enjoy the chance to receive free products they consider valuable. Whether the incentive is a free tank of gas, limited access to an online fee-based service, or free song downloads, consumers are happy to participate. In some cases, they’ll increase their purchase order or buy new products in order to take advantage of a promotion. In other cases, they’ll willingly exchange their contact information to receive your promotional incentives.

Your marketing campaigns are ultimately designed to sell your products. The challenge is to motivate your audience to buy them. Digital promotional incentives will excite your market, educate them about your products, and encourage their loyalty to your brand. And they’ll do so at a lower cost than using other advertising channels. Now is the time to explore how promotional incentives can drive traffic and increase sales for your company.

Promotional Currency is THE leading digital promotions firm, merging digital technology, artist licensing and promotional risk coverage to deliver turnkey, fixed-cost solutions for the promotional marketplace.  Promotional incentives such as music download promotions, ringtone promotions, mobile promotion, skins promotions and online instant win games and sweepstakes are powerful, multi-pronged promotional marketing tools build customer loyalty and drive sales.

–Cynthia Walker

Entertain your consumers with promotional incentives to differentiate your brand and boost sales through increased brand interest and customer loyalty.

Customer loyalty programs work by offering customers incentives and encouraging their continued business so sellers can see huge returns. Sounds easy, right?

Unfortunately, customer loyalty programs aren’t always that simple. They have to be done correctly and there is, like all potentially successful business ventures, some risk involved. Potential cost overruns, incentives which fail to trigger the intended response, and poor audience targeting all threaten to impede the success of any customer loyalty program. But, there’s good news: these risks can be managed. The question is, how? Here’s your answer:

Link the Promotional Incentives to the Product

In any customer loyalty program, the promotional incentive should always be related to the product. In other words, if you’re selling baby bath products, don’t reward your customers with a free oil change. Instead, help your customers make a connection in their mind between the product and the reward. The easiest way to link your incentive to your product is to make the product itself the incentive. You see this all the time at coffee shops who hand out “Buy 10, Get 1 Free” cards to their customers. And guess what? It works.

Inject Perceived Value Into the Customer Loyalty Program

One of the interesting psychological effects of a customer loyalty program is the tendency for consumers to value the promotional incentive outside the bounds of monetary value. To illustrate this phenomenon, let’s return to our coffee shop example. In the case of a free cup of coffee, it’s reasonable to assume the incentive has a monetary value of $2.

However, a lowly $2 cash rebate offered after 10 purchases would be unlikely to generate an increase in business. Customers are more inclined to consider the “value” of the free coffee based upon the experience they anticipate while enjoying it. ??This clearly works to a company’s advantage. A customer loyalty program can be designed to deliver a high perceived value to consumers while still yielding a respectable ROI for the business.

Remember, a Customer Loyalty Program is an Investment

Not all customer loyalty programs are going to provide an instant ROI. Depending on the length of the program, how it’s introduced to the market and the cost for the customer, a program can take time.  For example, a widely advertised customer loyalty program based on $2 coffee sales, something many customers buy almost every day, is going to bring a return faster than it would on, say, $75 haircuts, something customers may only purchase once every few months.

Don’t let this dissuade you from exploring a customer loyalty program. Instead, look at them as an investment, whether it be short-term or long-term. For companies that take advantage of it, a good customer loyalty program can yield dividends for years.

Promotional Currency (PC) is a digital promotions firm that merges digital technology, artist licensing and promotional risk coverage to deliver turnkey, fixed-cost solutions that meet the unique needs and budgets of the brand marketing or b2b marketing client. Among product offered are: unique customer loyalty programs, promotional incentives, online promotions and mobile promotions.
 

Marketing Promotions including digital promotions continue to spur billions of dollars in annual sales for product suppliers. By offering promotional incentives, companies can tap into a vast pool of responsive consumers. Promotional marketing professionals often pursue conventional advertising methods to penetrate new markets.

The promotional industry offers a host of powerful marketing advantages to product suppliers. Digital promotions can be used to tap into new, robust markets. These b2b marketing promotions, or consumer targeted promotions improve customer loyalty and offer a channel to build customer databases for future marketing promotions.

The Key Advantages of Digital Promotions:

1.  The value of digital promotions is becoming more widely recognized, yet many companies still fail to fully appreciate their potential so there is less competition in marketing promotions using digital promotions.

2.  Digital Promotions using incentive promotions can be used to educate a market about a new product. When a product is developed, its success hinges upon the market’s awareness. In order to penetrate a retail sector, the supplier must have a way to introduce the product and educate the market regarding its use and value. This education often forms the core of market acceptance and customer acquisition.

3.  Digital promotions can also improve brand loyalty and increase the value of existing customer relationships. Once a product supplier has penetrated a new retail market, it is critical that they continue marketing to those customers. This can be accomplished by capturing customer data online and using it to launch an ongoing string of personalized digital promotions.

4.  Digital Promotions decrease the expense of building customer databases and customer loyalty programs.  Saturating a new customer base with digital promotions offers increases the value of each customer by increasing the lifespan of the customer.

Customers appreciate the value of digital promotions and the companies which offer them benefit from brand association to digital promotions.  Offer your customer promotional incentives of digital promotions and you may just gain a customer for life.