7 Free Promotional Opportunities
While a handful of new Benjamins may be hard to miss sitting out in the open on a table, are you doing the same thing with your marketing? Every marketer needs to maximize every revenue opportunity because you never know when fate will deal you a bad hand.
In my corporate experience, marketing plans can have a range of effectiveness but the worse challenges often come from unforeseen circumstances beyond your control as a marketer. Therefore, it’s important to make the most of every opportunity.
To ensure that you’re not leaving money on the table, here are seven free promotional opportunities within your organization. These opportunities leverage your current communications to increase revenues. Some of these options can yield sizable returns because the media is free and has a better chance of being read. (Understand that you’ll probably need some programming and operational support.) Of course the one element that you can’t overlook is a relevant call-to-action!
- Make a special welcome email offer. Just as it’s important to fish when the fish are swimming, the same is true of your marketing. To this end, make new email registrants a targeted offer to get them to establish the purchasing habit while you’ve got their attention. While you can make them a offer later in time, it may take more time and resources to convert these customers because they’ll be onto the next new thing by then. Take advantage of the thank you screen after prospects register for your emailing.
- Include a deal in the email confirmation mailing. Similarly, use the followup confirmation email to get prospects buying from your firm as soon as possible. Since it’s a good idea to send a tailored email, this is a great way to achieve two objectives with one mailing. Another reason to do this is the fact that customers tend to have an email address just for company promotions. You want to maximize your chances of getting them to buy.
- Add targeted offers to non-promotional communications. Take advantage of every customer interaction. Include a promotion in customer service and other non-purchase emails (unless you know that the recipient is a bad credit risk.) The benefit is that these communications are often expected since they’re customer initiated and as a result, there’s a good chance that your email will wind up in the prospect’s main mailbox.
- Include promotion with social media engagement. Many companies find that adding a special offer to entice prospects onto their social media pages helps build fans. Use this opportunity to provide prospects with content they find useful (not marketing-speak) to help get them to purchase. (Check out why email and social media go together!)
- Add a special offer to your bills. Since customers check their statements, credit card companies have printed special deals on their monthly statements. Why not give customers a reason to buy again and build the shopping habit? Give them a promotion for a future sale. Again, here’s a place where you want to selectively make offers based on past payment history.
- Place an offer in your product package. This promotion is a twofer. Traditional direct marketers have been doing this for years. Include an offer for related product and/or ancillary products. In fact, many of them use it as a revenue stream by including other marketer’s advertisements in their packages (aka package inserts). You can do the same by getting other marketers to place inserts in your packages. Or save your budget and make a trade with them.
- Incorporate a promotion in employees’ email signature file. If you’re working in a company, make employees use a standard signature file and incorporate a promotional link that can be changed centrally. The larger your organization, the better this works. What’s even better is that this media doesn’t have a cost and it often gets through to recipients’ main email address.
Use this list as a guide and assess the potential for adding promotions to all of your customer interactions. To help determine the revenues generated, use a separate promotional code for each media or communication.
Have you tried any of these revenue-generating options? If so, how effective were they? Do you have any other suggestions?
Happy marketing,
Heidi Cohen
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Photo credit: Casey Serin via Flickr
