By now, as you may have noticed, personalisation is vital in today’s marketing world. You must personalise and customise every interaction, whether physical or digital, that your brand has with your customers or audience as much as possible.
Therefore, the gathering and careful analysis of small and big data provides marketers and brand owners like you with a clear picture of how, when and why to approach your customers in order to serve them with the information they’re looking for at the time they need it the most.
So, you should give promo marketing the same or more attention as an important part of your overall marketing mix or marketing plan/strategy, to personalise it to your target audience. A well-developed, personalised promotional marketing campaign/strategy is going to yield outstanding results in brand awareness, brand recognition, customer loyalty, leads and conversions, not to mention the great effect it has on employee satisfaction.
The key is to get the pros to help you develop and execute your strategy. Also, follow these simple yet important rules to get your personalised corporate gifts, employee welcome kits or recognition packages and your entire promo merch plan up to scratch with today’s demanding audiences.
How to Implement a Merch Personalisation Strategy:
Make Sure You Have the Right Resources
If you first consider your promo merch strategy from the beginning of your overall marketing strategy development, you’ll position the right resources to make the plan a success story
Getting the right personalised product ready on time requires allocating resources like staff, a budget and enough time. If you do this right and have a team of passionate experts by your side, you’ll avoid plenty of headaches and the results will surpass your expectations.
Gather as Much Customer Data as Possible
Current customers, new clients, prospects, new employees, old employees, and business partners – in essence, you must know extremely well whoever is going to receive your promo merch strategy. Use every channel of data available to create a detailed profile of your target so you can deliver the goodies they’ll love and use in their daily life.
This process of gathering and processing data pays off tremendously and it’s already required for your entire marketing strategy, so the info is already there; you might as well take full advantage of it.
Synergise with Other Channels
As we mentioned earlier, promo products are part of your entire marketing effort. Thus, their existence must be synchronised with the rest of your marketing actions. It must also support those other actions, and vice versa.
Opportunities to do this are only limited by your creativity. Some examples include CTA’s for social media actions, landing pages and contests.
Consider Each Stage of Your Customer Journey
From leads to prospects and even regular customers, you must take into consideration where each one is on their particular journey. This will be a determining factor in how you approach them from a promo merch point of view.
You can achieve outstanding results in brand awareness, brand recognition, customer loyalty, leads, and conversions, not to mention a great effect on employee satisfaction, with a well-developed, personalised promotional marketing campaign/strategy.
Constantly Update and Refine
Each promotional product campaign is a chance to learn and improve. During your planning stage, define which KPIs you’re going to be measuring throughout the project. Once the campaign has concluded, gather all your data and perform a deep analysis so you can improve your next move.
Benefits of Marketing Personalisation for Promotional Products:
Improved Customer Experience
Drive Revenue
Increase Brand Loyalty
Create Consistency Across Channels
Effectively target specific audiences
Build deeper relationships with customers
Give a face to your business
Need Ideas for Marketing Personalisation?
Promotional marketing helps your brand connect better with clients, generating loyalty and building strong long-term relationships by increasing the brand’s respect and love.
If you’re looking for personalised corporate gifts, employee welcome kits, new client packages or any other type of promotional marketing materials, get in touch with us to receive some custom ideas you’re going to love.
In the meantime, check out our Xmas catalogue, subscribe to our newsletter for the latest product trends and play around with our ROI calculator to get an idea of the scope of your project.
Here are a few ideas to get you inspired. Hope to hear from you soon!
Timely gifts and products specific to audience behaviours and segmentation
Adding names and initials to products
Membership kits
Cupcakes, macarons and cookies
Custom wine and drink bottles
Custom sneakers and apparel
DIY Kits for highly personalised promo experiences
Laser engraved as a decoration technique for delivering with class
You strive to gain new customers, right? Regardless of its size, your marketing department works daily to pull in prospects and convert them into clients. Once achieved, the next step involves converting these new clients into loyal brand ambassadors.
Maybe your customer service team will handle your clients from this point. However, a well-designed welcome kit can enhance this transition, boost loyalty, and delight clients.
Nevertheless, careful planning is needed for the new customer intake process. When assembling a new client welcome kit, focus on traits like personalisation, functionality, usefulness, information, and fun. A well-planned welcome kit can impress, but a poorly planned one can harm.
Luckily for you, we’ve put together this guide of welcome kit do’s and don’ts so you have a better understanding of how to tackle this process more efficiently. Read on to find out and get in touch with our experts to get your own new client welcome kit going.
Do’s
Personalisation and customisation are at the heart of successful welcome kits. A pre-prepared standard welcome kit is good, but it needs room for personalisation for each client. Make sure you allocate some of your marketing budget to new client welcome kit personalisation.
The Info
Your new client might have chosen you for specific services. Yet, your company may offer other services that this client might not know about.
To best inform your new client about your brand, such as other services you offer, success stories, experience, your processes, your team, and so forth, use an informative brochure. Make sure you keep this item easy to read, short, and straightforward, otherwise, there’s a big chance no one will read it.
Let your imagination fly and consider delivering this information through other channels, such as a video, website accessed through a QR code, interactive toy or tool, etc.
Welcome Kits Do’s and Dont’s: Tools N ́ Toys
Once you’ve dealt with the informative part of your welcome kit, it’s time to get down to the good stuff. This is your opportunity to surprise and delight your client. Be bold, be original, but be yourself, or better yet, let your brand be itself.
The items you select must reflect or communicate part of your brand message, its values, and its personality. But they also have to connect with your client by being interesting, useful, fun, and something that will be present in their lives for a long time.
The most important aspect of your welcome kit, and the one that’ll ensure it gets the results you want (loyalty, delight, etc.), is to invest the appropriate amount of resources into it by letting the experts make the process smoother and more efficient.
Don’ts
We’re going to keep the negative section of the “don’ts” short and straight to the point: Don’t be lazy, unoriginal, or petty. If you just assemble a regular old kit with a calendar, a pen, a notebook, or something similarly boring, don’t be surprised if your client isn’t surprised by your kit and forgets about it faster than you can say “welcome”.
Don’t go at it alone. Your team might have the best intentions in mind, but allowing a team of dedicated professionals to assist you in creating the perfect welcome kit will take a weight off your shoulders. And you’ll have peace of mind knowing your kit’s success is guaranteed. Let’s START HERE!
Events and merchandise have long gone hand in hand. With our comprehensive event merchandise guide, we aim to help you navigate through creating a successful strategy. Think of the last few events you attended and chances are the first thing that comes to your mind is the merchandise you took home like that personalised A5 notebook, that t-shirt printed right in front of you, or your favourite stubby holder that you still proudly use for those coldies.
Creating a successful event merchandise strategy is both a science and an art that requires a careful process that enhances your brand and messaging through interactive designs; visual concepts, creative copy and taglines, product sourcing, development, design and distribution.
1. Custom event merchandise extends your event’s brand value.
Driving brand awareness far beyond the date of the event is number one because your event merchandise gives your brand continued exposure for a long time. Keep in mind that attendees wear and/or use your merchandise, this creates an implicit but powerful endorsement of your brand.
2. Custom merchandise is a valuable way to engage more with your audience.
Event attendees are there because they want to be there. This simply means they have interest and passion that they want to show by attending and by expressing it through the merchandise they receive. This is the perfect opportunity for your brand to engage with a willing audience and provide them with the means to express their support for the event and your brand. It’s a unique chance to commemorate the event long after the date has passed. This solidifies the connection between your brand and your audience. Think ROI of the event way after the event has finished. Brand exposure and brand loyalty. Marketing gold.
3. Merchandise can also be a significant source of extra revenue.
Most of the time event merchandise is given away as a promotional tool to attract customers and to drive brand awareness. However, a well-designed item that is useful and attractive enough to be sold might bring in some cash. The key is to create products that people want, creating an even better experience for attendees. Why not think about personalising your merch at the event for a truly memorable takeaway?
The Process of Creating Merchandise that Rocks
Live events are a fantastic opportunity to boost the emotional connection your brand has and needs with your audience. This in-person kind of engagement is highly valuable and should be addressed through a careful design process.
It doesn’t matter if your brand is B2B or B2C. Recent studies show that both types of customers are looking for the same things when it comes to selecting a brand and making a purchase. The convergence of B2B and B2C sentiments towards brands has created a new B2E (‘E’ for everyone) environment where marketers need to compete and thrive (some also refer to this as H2H- Human to Human).
In 2018, our experts created and launched the Kids Summer of Racing merchandise campaign for that year’s Victoria Summer Racing Event. The items created for the event proved to be an effective branding tool that will continue to be beneficial for a long time. Beyond a 2019 APPA award for the campaign, this case exemplifies that following the process described below will boost your brand reach, awareness and engagement significantly.
Concept
Conceptualisation takes place even before you start developing your event merchandise strategy by strategically selecting what events your brand needs to be a part of. This will help you better structure your budget in order to get the most out of each event, whether it’s just one per year or more throughout the year.
Once the event or events have been chosen, invest the necessary resources into each one, taking into consideration that each different event varies in scope, audience type, theme and maybe even location and other variables. So don’t create a one-size-fits-all plan, instead personalise each event’s plan.
With this in mind, add your brand’s identity, message, values and a generous portion of creativity to design an interactive and engaging event merchandise concept that resonates with your audience and creates a unique experience they will cherish and remember.
Planning
As the conceptualisation part of the process gets its finishing touches, you must start planning the execution of your event merchandising plan. During this phase, your team of experts must consider everything from providers, testing, delivery times, distribution, packaging, presentation, etc.
As much as designing and picking the right items is important, designing how you’re going to hand them to your audience is also crucial. Plan an interactive and engaging experience that goes beyond just handing out goodies to all those that pass by your booth. In other words, make both the merch and the experience attached to it memorable. Plus, make them connected to each other in a synergistic way.
Execution
Once everything is in place, execute your strategy from designing the items and the experience to placing orders, tracking and receiving them, to planning out the day of the event and having a plan B for everything in case anything goes wrong. This is one of the most important reasons for having a team of experts backing you up all the way, so they can ensure everything goes as planned.
Our event merchandise experts are here to help you. We’ll dig deeper to understand your brand in order to create merch that’ll rock your audience’s socks off! Set up a meeting here now.
You’ve just finished celebrating a new client signing with your team. Amazing, right? But what actions do you take between that glorious contract signing and the actual project kickoff?
Many companies neglect a proper client intake system, missing a significant opportunity to boost their reputation and revenue. The optimal way to maximise this period involves a properly branded and customised new Client Welcome Kit.
You stand as an expert in your industry and you will carry out your client’s job well. Now, let our experts guide you in creating a new Client Welcome Kit that’ll distinguish your company from the crowd.
Make the Welcome Kit Informative
Intended to delight your clients and foster happy customers, every Welcome Kit should also serve as a tool to ensure they possess all the necessary information to work with you.
Right after signing a contract or reaching an agreement, send a 2- or 3-page PDF containing crucial information about the work you’ll do for your client. Create a master version that you can swiftly customise for each client and project.
This “brochure” should act as part welcome wagon, part client roadmap, and part FAQ. Keep it simple, easy to read, and engaging so your client feels compelled to respond to it.
Keep It Fun
Once you’ve got the informative part of the Welcome Kit taken care of, it’s time to make sure it’s fun. A Welcome Kit for clients should contain items that are designed, selected and customised to be fun in a way related to their industry, to the project and/or to their company’s style. (check out here some popular options)
Be original, but also be mindful of culture, values and other factors that might touch on different sensibilities. Make them age-appropriate and consider how your client will use it on a daily basis, which takes us to the next point.
Take into consideration everything you know about your client (think about using the buyer persona method) and let’s come up together with items that’ll be present in their everyday life in a useful manner. Something useful covers everything from a daily planner, a pen, and a hat, to more specific items that might be used for work or daily life as a meter of some sort, a light, and so on.
Deliver with Class
Of course, regular carrier delivery works most of the time. But you might want to take things up a notch, depending on what your client would appreciate. A special delivery service, a great looking package that is original and might be useful too, or even just delivering it yourself might make more of an impact and reassure your client they’ve picked the right company.
Benefits of using welcome kits for new clients
Going the extra mile by surprising and delighting your client has plenty of benefits, including:
Reinforcing your client’s decision to work with you.
Managing their expectations.
Easing your client into a new process.
Surprising and delighting your client.
Reinforcing your brand in your client’s mind.
And much more. Now that you see the benefits and understand that a new client intake system is crucial, contact us to let us take care of the entire process for you and make sure the items you include are there to make a difference.
What did your employees or staff get last Christmas? Do you remember what you gave your clients or business partners? How about your colleagues? If you don’t remember, it’s more than likely that they don’t remember either, which means they don’t remember your brand. Not so good, right?
The good news is that this year you can get into Christmas gift-planning mode early and hit a home run with personalised, innovative, fun and memorable items that will last in your recipient’s mind for the entire year. How do we know that?
Red Tomato is Australia’s leading promotional marketing agency because we care enough to go the extra mile to get you the items your brand needs and your target audience wants. Read on to find out more details about how we do it, and some tips to help you get better results, and check out an impressive case study along with our Christmas Catalogue full of fantastic product ideas. Ready? Let’s go!
Xmas Corporate Merchandise: It’s All About Timing
To truly hit a home run with your corporate gift-giving this year, the first factor to take into consideration is timing. If you get your process started with enough time, chances are you’ll get every detail right, you’ll have time to fix any issues, and the entire process will run smoothly.
Lead Times and Order Placement for Corporate Christmas Gifts
If you’ve read this far, you know we like to go above and beyond your expectations. Allow enough time to review quotes, organise samples and always add a couple of extra days to allow our experts to dig deep and search for new and innovative products that’ll really rock your clients’ socks off!
Remember to take into consideration the time it takes depending on where you get the merch from. For instance:
Local Options: 10 -15 working days.
Last-minute options are available, with 24-hour express services at a premium.
China Air Freight services: 6 – 8 weeks* depending on the item and the supplier.
China Sea Freight services: 10 – 12 weeks*, also depending on the item and the supplier.
*The clock starts once all artwork and sampling is done.
Samples with China
When sampling products with China, it’s okay to have feedback until you’re happy with the product because it can be a hit-and-miss sometimes.
Quality Issues for Corporate Christmas Gifts
Our experts are very passionate about our quality control process. They’ll make sure every order you place is spot-on and meets our and your standards.
In general terms, our QC process involves:
Final artwork sent to China
Sample sent to Red Tomato for QC
The sample sent to the client for approval
Approved items put into mass production
Packing photos – matched with art approval
Order sent to the client after Red Tomato has completed a final QC
Ideal Volume: How Many Items Should You Order?
Generally speaking, when ordering from China the rule is ‘the more the better’, meaning usually over 1000 units.
Over 1CBM* or 100kg – best to send via Sea Freight
25CBM = 20ft container
50CBM = 40ft container
*CBM = Cubic Metre
Bulk Pricing
When you decide to order general merchandise in advance to get bulk pricing, you’ll save time, avoid rushing factories, have a better chance of getting it right the first time, be able to be creative with your order and add fine details such as packaging and ‘surprise and delight elements.
One of our favourite Christmas corporate gift stories is Kennards Hire Christmas Monopoly 2018. Last year, Kennards was celebrating their 70th anniversary and wanted to thank and reward their staff for their hard work, effort and loyalty. They settled on a family classic, Monopoly, that would hero their branches and the range of products that they offer through the property squares, cards and custom tokens. Needless to say, the gift was a success among all recipients and is something they’ll cherish and use for a very long time.
Now you know how the process works and when to get started.
What’s next?
Check out our brand new 2019 Xmas Catalogue! Browse freely and make a list of your favourite items. Then get in touch with our experts so they can guide you through the entire process and make sure Xmas 2019 is unforgettable; plus, get great deals by starting your 2020 branded items planning now too!
1300 776 733
hi@redtomato.com.au 
