How Gifts Increase Your Campaign ROI

Promotional Gifts exist for a reason – to get response and increase the ROI (Return On Investment) of a marketing campaign. But realizing and knowing this does not answer questions like: how often do you measure the ROI and where do you actually begin?

To answer this you have to set some strategic objectives for your campaign. Let’s take the example of using stress balls to direct people to a new website. Every campaign needs objectives because if you do not know where you want to go, you won’t know how to get there. So set your goals and objects and make them clear. Also, make them SMART – specific, measureable, achievable, realistic, and timely. Then, choose a promotional gift that ties into the campaign theme. And finally capture response data for analysis and for comparing to the campaign objectives.

As an example, let’s take a campaign that is centered on reducing stress at work. Perhaps a stress armchair is chosen and printed with the website address and a ‘call to action’ – giving people a reason or incentive to visit the new website. Then by using website monitoring and tracking software – such as Google Analytics or some other statistical software package, measures are set to capture the number of visits to specific pages, actions (such as requests for further information), and sign ups to email lists or to a certain, specific program.

Once the data has been collected over a given time period, it can then be compared to the campaign objectives – the strategic objects set in terms of number of visitors and actions. Of course you cannot measure everything; there is a trend in some organizations that is called ‘analysis-paralysis’. However, simply spending marketing budget is realistically not enough in these economic times, when every business action has to make a positive contribution!