Giveaways for marketing

How are giveaways used for marketing?

Giveaways, also known as premiums, are products or services which are given away free or at a low price in order to provide incentives for customers to buy the product or service.  There are a number of them, let us have a look at some.

Free-in or on-pack gifts where a small item is attached to your product as it is sold.

Free-in-the-mail giveaways where your customer collects tokens or packaging and then redeems them for a free gift.

Self-liquidating offers which see the promotion cover its own costs i.e.  the giveaway breaks even.  So your customer benefits because they get the product at a lower price.  You benefit because you buy product/gifts in bulk at a lower price per item.  In a nutshell the customer purchases at your cost price plus a small admin fee.  Be careful though, you don’t want to be stuck with excess stock so everything must go!

Buy-one-get-one-free (BOGOF) is where the customer gets two items for the price of one.  To the consumer it feels like they’re getting your product at half price, but in reality you simply doubled your cost price.  Please go to the chapter on price for an example, as well as other creative ways to use price in your marketing.