5 Effective Ways to Measure the ROI of Promotional Products

Is your swag really working? You hand out hundreds of branded journals at a trade show. You freely give out mugs and tote bags at career fairs. You’re generous with promotional pens; you have been giving them out for years. At some point, you just feel like you can’t keep track of all these giveaways and pinpoint their value to your company. 

The truth is promo products can be easily traceable. Here are 5 simple methods to do that:

1. Strong CTA

When tracking the results generated by promotional products, a solid CTA (Call-to-Action) is an absolute must. A CTA makes it simple to measure the effectiveness of your giveaways and should be used with every other strategy you adopt from this list.

Want some examples? “Get a free trial,” “Talk to a consultant anytime,” “Answer the online survey,” “Get 20% off.” A CTA asks the person to take an action and makes it clear how to do so.

Print an offer with a strong CTA directly on your promo and monitor the traffic it generates. If the offer is useful and relevant for the consumer, you will have no problem seeing people react to strong CTAs.

By making your CTA simple and appealing, you ensure that your recipients will take you up on your offer.

2. Social Media Hashtags

Smartphones and social media are part of a consumer’s daily life. Put the hashtag you want your consumers to use on your promo items and track how many times that hashtag is referenced. Once you have identified those using the hashtag, you can follow them all the way through the buying journey.

3. QR codes or unique URLs

You can create a landing page for your promotional campaign and print the URL or a QR code on your giveaways. Here you go – now you can track the hits/leads/sales that come directly from the products.

4. Phone numbers

Create a specific phone number and place it on your promos, tracking the number of calls that come as a result of the giveaways.

5. Promo Codes

Promo codes are given out everywhere – websites, social media, TV and radio ads, email marketing campaigns -- all day long. Print a promo code on your promotional product. It acts as a strong CTA and can be easily tracked and traced for an ROI report.

For example, in a sports event, when giving customers a custom branded bag/cap/jersey of the team they are there to watch, place a CTA on the package or on the product itself telling them to go to the team store in the next 3 days and use a certain promo code for 20% off their next purchase. You can measure the ROI with the number of times the promo code is used. 

Thanks to our supplier partner SpectorandCo for allowing us to republish this blog.