Who among us can say we aren’t thankful when we walk into a retail store and have a free sample of a product immediately offered to us? It certainly isn’t difficult to understand the appeal of free product samples as far as customers are concerned – and given how much customers like them, it doesn’t take much thinking to realise why brands are drawn to them, too.
Offering a sample of your product to target shoppers can be an excellent way of capturing potential customers in your brand’s ecosystem. If a customer is able to try your product without any financial commitment needed on their part, their experience might be enough to get them to talk about it to others, and to remember it on their next shopping trip.
But a product sampling campaign isn’t necessarily a “win-win” for every single brand. There are certain circumstances in which the offering of free samples will probably make particular sense for your brand, such as:
● Your product being high-quality, relevant, and worthy of being put to the test
If you’re still in the process of developing and testing your product internally, and even more so if the product isn’t up to the desired standard yet, launching a product sampling campaign around it could be an exceedingly bad idea.
You won’t want your target customers to associate your brand with the subpar experience that a poor-quality product sample would give them.
So, make sure your brand’s product is up to the necessary standard, before you expose it to the punishing public glare of a sampling campaign.
● Your budget allows you to comfortably incur sampling costs
A product sampling campaign could be brilliant for generating awareness of your brand, attracting and retaining potential customers, and getting people to provide “real-world” feedback on your product. These benefits can all feed into an improved bottom line for your brand.
However, this does not mean that the specific sampling campaign you are about to launch, will definitely give you a return on your investment. After all, you might be reading this as a business that has not previously offered free samples to potential customers.
So, for “safety-first” purposes, you should make sure your business’s budget can “take the hit” of the costs associated with product sampling. These include the expense of the product samples themselves, in addition to the likes of delivery, handling, marketing, and staffing.
● You have the associated resources to help make your sampling campaign a success
The formula for success with a product sampling campaign in the 2020s isn’t quite as straightforward as, “turn up in the supermarket with a table of product samples, and start offering them” – indeed, if that was ever truly the case.
That’s because it is crucial to ensure you have everything underpinning your product sampling campaign, that you will need if you are to achieve that aforementioned all-important ROI.
Partner with BrandWarriors, for example, and you won’t merely gain access to suitably skilled and seasoned promotional sampling staff, as you can also benefit from our in-depth expertise in the planning and delivery of such campaigns.
Indeed, our BrandWarriors can provide the complete end-to-end campaign management service, encompassing such vital elements as site planning, logistics, fulfilment, and execution.
We can also draw upon our bespoke app and sampling calculator, to help ensure you have all the relevant information and insights at your fingertips to enable the savvy tweaking of your campaign, as and when it may be needed.
As you can see from the above, a lot will go into making your next product sampling campaign a success, beyond ensuring you have a great product (as critically important as that obviously is).
Would you like to explore, in a higher level of detail, what an impactful product sampling campaign could look like for your brand, including the part the most capable promotional sampling staff can play in making it a triumph? If so, please don’t wait any longer to reach out to our BrandWarriors.