We love swag. Our inbound marketing agency ordered our first swag last year – a nice little notebook for conference attendees. This year we bought some cool 2Gb USB drives that are the same shape and size of a key so you can put them on your keychain. If you’ve stopped by our office, you’ve probably received one!
What is swag? It’s loot, booty, spoil, plunder… the treasure you get from companies in return for visiting their booth, helping them online, or just being friends with someone with the keys to the swag locker. Back in the dot com heyday, I remember walking out of a conference with more swag than I could carry, included was a wireless keyboard and mouse from Microsoft!
Swag is a bit more sensible nowadays and the business around it continues to evolve. This week I’ve been talking a lot to the team at WPEngine (Founder Jason Cohen is on our radio show guest Friday) so I got a really cool response back to a suggestion I gave them. I received a link to SwagLove to pick out a product and get it delivered directly to me!
Here’s how SwagLove works
- Sign up for free, choose your promotional gift items, upload and position your custom artwork.
- Get your links and send them to people you want to flatter
- Recipients follow the link to your branded landing page where they enter their size and shipping address
- We take care of printing, shipping, customs and customer service, in case of any hiccups (like ‘oops, I ordered the wrong size!’)
- You only pay for redeemed giveaways so you never waste a t-shirt or a penny
How cool is that? Instead of purchasing a box of Swag that you may run out of or may not be able to give away, now you can just fund your SwagLove account and pay as you go! And your customer gets to select the Swag they want! Too cool!
Doug,
Thanks for the shout-out! I’m glad you like our service. It’s a pretty radical departure from the ways of the traditional promotional products industry, but web companies seem to be embracing it.
We’re starting to see some pretty innovative merchandise marketing campaigns. Some companies like WPEngine are giving away free swag to new customers as part of the signup process. Others are using swag as part of customer acquisition campaigns. So for example, “if you signup for a free trial we’ll give you this cool shirt as a free gift”. The really innovative ones are taking it even further and using retargeting campaigns featuring the merchandise to incent people to return to the site and signup. The sky’s the limit really. This is just the beginning. There’s innovative ways for every tech marketer to use physical merchandise (swag) in their marketing. And since most online marketers and internet companies never actually send anything to their customers, it’s a welcome surprise to get something physical from a virtual company. It really leaves a lasting impression.
If you or your readers have any questions or want to brainstorm merchandise marketing with me, I’d be glad to help however I can!