How to Measure ROI with Promotional Merchandise

If you’re in the marketing world, you know that ROI is not just a convenient acronym. BRB, OMG, and LOL (amongst others) could never pull the weight that ROI does, and with good reason. When your business depends on your Return on Investment (ROI), this becomes a very serious matter. Promotional merchandise is a no-brainer when you’re growing your brand: it’s cost-effective, improves customer engagement, and boosts brand awareness. What’s best is that the use of promotional products is tangibly measurable. In this article, we’ll explore how to measure ROI with promotional merchandise.

Benefits of Promotional Merchandise

We know that there are various avenues of marketing nowadays– from radio ads to social media promotion. Nonetheless, promotional merchandise continues to be an effective way to reach a wide audience. Most people keep promotional products and use them quite frequently. This doesn’t just remind clients of your services. It’s been found that one in three people are more likely to do business with a company after they’ve received a branded gift. In addition, your exposure will multiply if you’re using merchandise like reusable bags or branded t-shirts that will be used frequently in public.

Choosing the Best Product for ROI

At Red Tomato, we understand that, as a Marketer, it’s crucial to measure your success. Your marketing campaign can’t be a haphazard, blind investment. Your strategy needs to have a tangible, quantifiable endgame. As Andy Cohen, of the Advertising Specialty Institute, stated, “Ultimately, the return on investment that clients receive from using promotional products in their marketing campaigns can be found in the fact that the items have an extremely low cost-per-impression (CPI).” In other words, your choice of product needs to be wisely calculated. You may want to impress your clients with an expensive bottle of wine or the shiniest new tech gadget, but you may end up spending too much money on something that your client will never use.

How, then are you to choose the best product for your ROI? After all, you are looking to build positive brand associations with your clients. Sending them cheap or useless products with your logo on it, just to lower your CPI, will only prove that you’re cheap and thoughtless. At Red Tomato, we will brainstorm what kind of product is related to your business, useful, and will provide high visibility. Talkdesk’s Shauna Geraghty suggests, “The perfect promotional item with the largest ROI will inevitably be one that takes into account brand messaging, costs constraints and customer interest equally to make the appropriate product decision.”

How to Measure ROI with Promotional Merchandise

After you’ve chosen and distributed the perfect promotional merchandise, it’s important to measure how successful your campaign has been. This is where ROI comes in. A simplified way of calculating ROI would be to take the amount you’ve earned from the campaign and subtract the amount you spent on the product, shipping, trade show costs, and so on. However, with promotional merchandise, this measurement can be a bit more complex, due to factors such as reach and quantifiable purchases. Thankfully, you don’t have to worry about complicated math equations anymore. We’ve taken the time to create an ROI Calculator specifically for promotional merchandise products to help you measure your success. Be sure to take a look and use it for your next marketing campaign!

Do you have any questions about how to measure ROI with promotional merchandise? What products have been the most successful for your ROI? Please share in the comments below!