People love receiving promotional products. In fact, they’re one of the only advertisements that your target audience will actually thank you for.
But are you leveraging this goodwill or missing out on a golden opportunity?
It’s easy for Promo to fall into the “set and forget” category. If this sounds familiar to your situation, you might be leaving money and leads on the table.
Here’s how you can maximise your marketing dollar and set up a lead nurturing campaign for recipients of your branded merchandise.
What is a lead nurturing campaign?
A lead nurturing campaign is the process of sending personalised and relevant content to prospects and customers targeted at their current stage in the buying journey.
The buying journey can be simplified into three main areas:
Awareness -> Consideration -> Decision
The intention is to nurture them further down the buying funnel until they eventually take your goal action.
This could be a purchase, free trial or booking an appointment with your sales team for example.
How to get started on setting up a nurture campaign?
These are the basic steps for setting up any nurture campaign. It will work great for recipients of your promo or other lead magnets you have created for the business.
These can be done manually or automatically with the help of marketing platforms like HubSpot, Marketo or MailChimp.
- Get their details
- Identify what stage of the buying journey they are located
- Create a plan for content and goals for each interaction
- Set up a timeline
- Measure and optimise
Get Their Details
It’s hard to contact someone if you don’t have their email or phone number.
An easy way to get the recipients details is having them complete a form or trade their business card in exchange for something useful (such as a promotional product with your logo).
It’s also recommended if possible to get some additional information that helps to identify what content might be relevant to them and their location in the buying journey.
This could be their role, history with purchasing or anything else you can think of that might be valuable. Just keep in mind the more fields required the harder it will be to get people to complete it.
Identify Their Location In The Buyer Journey
It’s important to understand where in the buyer journey this person is as this will impact the best content for them to receive.
As previously mentioned there are three broad areas.
Awareness: The customer becomes aware they have a problem that needs to be resolved (a problem your organisation can solve).
Consideration: Buyers now have more knowledge about their problem and begin to create a list of companies and products that offer a good solution.
Decision: The buyer narrows down their list and selects a vendor that fits their buying criteria.
Create The Content And Timelines
Now is the most important part, sending the right content at the right time.
It’s important to have a good understanding of your target demographic and recipient to create content that’s useful and relevant to them.
Here are some ideas below that you can send to prospects at different stages in their journey. And some lead nurturing best practices you should take into consideration as well.
Awareness
- Blog Posts
- Social media posts
- White papers
- Educational content
- eBooks
- Research studies
Consideration
- Videos
- Case studies
- Podcasts
- Webinars
- Free sample
Decision
- Free trials
- Demos
- Free consultations
- Coupons
- Product comparisons
You’ve already provided value by giving them an awesome product with your logo, now it’s time to delight them with awesome content that will build trust with your brand and turn them into loyal customers.
Set Up A Timeline and Nurture Journey
It can be easy to get carried away when you first start out with automated emailing platforms.
Just remember to keep your recipient in mind and not go overboard with the amount of contact.
Give them time to consume your content by setting delays between emails.
Sometimes less is more.
Measure and Optimise
Now it’s time to see how things went and adjust and optimise.
You’ll want to make sure you have enough data before you go about making assumptions.
When you’re looking at results pay attention to these metrics:
- Open, click and unsubscribe rates for nurtured leads
- What subject lines had high open rates
- What content people are engaging with (clicks)
- New sales generated from nurtured leads
- Average sales price of nurtured vs unnurtured leads
Summing Up
The synergy of lead nurturing and promotional products presents a great opportunity for organisations looking to generate more qualified leads and sales.
If you haven’t utilised promotional products as a “foot in the door” lead generator already it’s something you should test out for yourself.
Get started on putting together a plan today and if you have any questions or are looking for product recommendations get in touch.
Matt has spent over eight years in Australia’s promotional products industry. As part of the Promotion Products marketing team, he manages product catalogues and content, keeping brands up to date with what’s new and what works. A contributor to the APPA Magazine, Matt brings practical insight into how quality merch helps businesses stand out.