Sometimes the best of your marketing efforts can go wasted. But when it happens, it’s not a good feeling. You’d ideally want your customers to respond, take action, call you up, or buy from you. Although actual buying would come in at a later stage, you’ll do well enough if you can get them to respond to you. For most marketers, that itself is a good achievement. If you are sending out actual, tangible goods (promotional items) as a part of your direct marketing, how do you make it easy for your customers to respond to you? Here are some tips:
There’s no dearth of communication options today
There’s a slew of ways customers can now respond by taking action – any action that you want them to take. Some of your campaigns would have calls-to-action such as for the customers to email you, call you, visit your website and download something, sign-up for your newsletter, ‘like’ your Facebook fan page, follow you on twitter and much more. Send out multiple campaigns and have some of these calls-to-action options while mainly asking them to respond in one particular way (like sign-up for your company newsletter, for instance). That way, you’ll force them to focus and you’ll keep your message clear.
Use QR codes on your promotional merchandise
QR codes are the latest fad to hit the marketing world. If your customers have smartphones, they could just swipe their phone (there’s an app for that) and they would get all the relevant information about your campaign right on their phone. Can you imagine what you could do with that? Promotional items such as bags, wallets, pens, USB sticks (on the outside surface), print ads, flyers, and brochures could all have a QR code on them. Swiping on it would give customers a way to respond to you – maybe check out your latest offers, sign-up for your newsletter, or what have you.
Tap on mobiles and tablets
Most customers have taken to the latest smart phones and tablets (popularized by the Apple iPad but now followed up by plenty of manufacturers with their own tablets). For the mobile phones and the tablets, the user interface is different. You could have special mobile- and tablet-enabled websites so that your customers can immediately respond to your marketing campaigns – whether it’s an online campaign or whether you sent out plenty of promotional merchandise.
Don’t overlook the fact that most customers access the net not just using desktops and laptops, but also phones and tablets. What’s better than customers responding to your calls-to-action immediately after receiving the merchandise that you custom-created for them?
