Determining if Your Promotional Product is Doing Its Job

It is finally over, the promotional campaign you started planning months ago is over. You took time to select the right things to give away, you made sure the logo placed on the item would be as effective as it could be. Now as you realize that you have finished the question comes, did it do what it was supposed too. Was your promotional campaign a success or a failure? Did it succeed in the goal of increased sales or customer loyalty, or did it fall short? Did the promotional product do its job?

Determining Your Goals
While this question is easy to ask, the answer may not be as straightforward as many would hope. After all, a lot of variables go into the answer. These variables range from such things as what the purpose of using promotional items was to a cost benefit analysis. However, the answer is still very important to those involved because it could mean the difference between success and failure in business. At its most basic level the promotional campaign is designed to increase something the business or individual feels needs to be increased. This increase could be in sales, customer opinion, or even just good advertising. While some of the question of success can be answered by a simple cost versus profit report, there are some things that are not that easy to figure out.

For example, if the campaign was intended to reward loyal customers and hopefully keep them loyal, how can this be determined without time passing by? If the campaign was intended to simply get the word out, some of the sales reports can reflect the impact of using promotional items, but again this is another thing that will take time to truly figure out. With so much that is uncertain where can someone turn to get direct answers?

Tracking Sales
The quickest (though not the most accurate) way to determine if a promotional campaign was a success is to track sales during the campaign. This works very well when the purpose of the campaign was to increase general sales, or to increase the sales of a particular item. It is even useful to a degree when the campaign was designed to gain customers, after all better sales means more customers came in. However when balanced against the cost of the campaign it may seem as if little was gained. The unfortunate part of any promotional campaign is that they cost money, and this money may not return until months after the campaign has ended.

Taking a Customer Poll
So if sales can’t answer the question then what other means exist? One common tactic to track the success of a promotional product is the customer poll. This is where a random sample of customers are asked to provide feedback either as they finish their shopping or several days afterward. The positive side to doing this is that it can give you information quickly, the down side is that the information may not be completely accurate. However when this information is combined with sales information a clearer picture can be made.

Observe Customer Behavior
Another tactic to determining the success of a promotional product is to follow it into the street. This does no mean stalk your customers, it means go to places where the group you targeted in the campaign frequent and see if they are using the items you gave to them. If you see your items fairly frequently, then chances are this will yield results that turn into sales. If you don’t, you might want to try to figure out why.

In the end the only real way for the question of a campaigns success or failure to be answered is through time. It’s a tough answer, but it is an answer nonetheless. However, when thinking about it ask yourself one question. If promotional products did not work a majority of the time, would people continue to use them in attempts to advertise, increase sales, and encourage customer loyalty. Considering business is about profit, if something is not profitable, most people tend not to do it. So now that the campaign is over, take a deep breath, relax for a minute, after all there is plenty of time to find out if everything worked out okay.