Marketing Partners Wanted
Introduction
Samples or trial offers are an excellent way to put products into the hands of consumers. They can be very effective in attracting new customers as well as being a vital ingredient in loyalty programs.
We’re looking for marketing partners who are interested in leveraging the sendmeasample.ca platform to increase brand awareness and drive their loyalty programs. If this is you, please do give us a call at 1-800-422-1309.
Highland Marketing has been fulfilling product samples, trial offers and campaign-related promotional items for a variety of clients since 1996. Over the years, we have developed a considerable amount of expertise in this field. It occurred to us that there could be value in setting up a Canadian website that consumers could visit to see what types of samples might be available.
As explained below, clients could designate offers as private or as public (general access). Consumers would have to register in order to access public offers for samples and promotional items. However, consumers would be able to access private offers without be registered on the sendmeasample.ca site.
It has also been suggested that gathering profile information for consumers that register on the site could enrich the value of the site to clients who offer samples via the site. The breadth of categories and levels of detail within each category are still undergoing discussion. Additionally, we are very interested to learn how other clients perceive the value of consumer profiling on the site.
1. Premise for sendmeasample.ca
Consumers can visit the sendmeasample.ca website to obtain free samples. Basically, we see visitors accessing the site in any of the following ways:
- accessing the site directly and browsing public pages on their own
- being directed to the offer pages (be they public or private) on the site by email
- clicking on a link in a banner ad
- other types of media advertising
2. Proposed types of pages and offers on sendmeasmaple.ca
It is our intention to provide a range of options for clients. Some of these will include the set up of the offer pages and data acquisition functions on Highland Marketing servers, which will be both high-performance and secure. Additionally, we will require mirror imaging to ensure that there are no data losses at any levels. However, as we note below, clients are not obligated to use Highland Marketing servers.
We are suggesting the following types of sampling services under the sendmeasample.ca umbrella.
2.1. Local hosting through a sendmeasmaple.ca web page
The sample offer would be made via a page on the sendmeasmaple.ca website itself name. For example:
sendmeasample.ca/Fly-Hi-Golf-Tees
Page setup, data capture and fulfillment services provided by Highland Marketing.
2.2. Local Hosting through a corporate domain name hosted on our server
The sample offer would be made via a site on our server, but accessible through a new domain name that reflects the client’s corporate name. For example:
XYZCorp_Samples.ca/Fly-Hi-Golf-Tees
Page setup/web design, data capture and fulfillment services provided by Highland Marketing.
2.3. Remote hosting with Highland Marketing web development
The sample offer would be made via a website hosted remotely on a client-owned server. For example:
XYZCorp.ca/Fly-Hi-Golf-Tees
Web design, data capture and fulfillment services provided by Highland Marketing.
2.4. Remote hosting with client or third party web development and Highland Marketing fulfillment
The sample offer would be made via a web page hosted remotely on a client-owned server. For example:
XYZCorp.ca/Fly-Hi-Golf-Tees
Web design data capture function would be written by client or third party, but fulfillment services would be provided by Highland Marketing.
3. Packaging
3.1. Package Sizes
Careful selection of package sizes can dramatically reduce postage costs. Given this, we foresee package sizes that fit into the following categories:
- Addressed Admail, Short/Long
- Addressed Admail, Oversize
- Dimensional Addressed Admail, Small
- Dimensional Addressed Admail, Large
Sometimes, we do ship larger parcels and can assist in coordinating packaging to keep shipping costs at a minimum.
3.2. Labeling & Branding
We will work with clients, as we always have, to recommend packaging that is the most cost-effective for a given project. This will include an assessment of samples to be mailed and suggesting ways to minimize postage costs.
Clients can optionally choose to either provide their own packaging design or use Highland Marketing’s package design services. Highland Marketing can also source custom packaging for any project. There has also been some suggestion that Highland Marketing might consider offering packaging featuring the sendmeasample.ca name. This will depend on whether clients prefer to have samples shipped in sendmeasmaple.ca packaging or their own privately labeled packaging.
4. Consumer Profiling
It has been suggested that a robust database will be an asset. Apart from name and address, we envision the basic profile as including birthdate, gender, gross family income, children in household, grandchildren and education level.
Additionally, we are considering building other profiles, based on a categorization similar to the one listed below. Interestingly, many of the categories do cross boundaries. At the outset, the key would be to keep it simple. Consumers would have the option of expanding their profiles when they wish to do so. It is our current thinking that if a new category is introduced, we would send an email to the consumers to make them aware of it so that they could update their profiles if they wished to do so.
All information gathered would be strictly controlled and compliant with Canadian privacy legislation. Consumers would be given the option to opt out of communications at whatever levels they wish. Consumers would, however, be informed that completing profiling information would increase the likelihood of receiving random free samples.
Sample profiling sections that are currently under consideration include:
- Leisure activities (e.g. hobbies, spectator sports, participatory sports, outdoor activities, video games etc.)
- Transportation (e.g. number of vehicles in household, style, model year, frequency of trade
- Entertainment
- Dining
- Pets
- Heath & Lifestyle
5. Types of Pages
We have seen many different types of sampling campaigns over the years. These include:
campaigns where everyone on a targeted list gets a sample. Typically, these consumers would have opted in to receive samples from different sources
campaigns where consumers are sent a personalized letter asking them to respond should they wish to receive a sample campaigns where consumers can respond to various types of media advertising to obtain a sample. This could be from a banner ad, a television ad, a free-standing insert, in-bound telemarketing, a business reply card or combinations thereof.
As mentioned above, we envision offer pages on sendmeasample.ca as being public or private.
With private pages, consumers could be targeted in one of many different ways and provided with a unique consumer code that they would use when they respond. Targeting could be directed toward selected groups within the sendmeasmaple.ca membership, specific consumers that are on the client file(s) or a combination of these.
Public pages would be accessible for browsing by all members of sendmeasmaple.ca. We would certainly hope to have a fairly high number of public pages to ensure regular visits to the by site members and other visitors.
6. Promotion
6.1. Highland Marketing Site Promotion
Highland Marketing would promote the site itself through several different channels. Some of those under consideration include:
- banner advertising
- direct mail
- social media
- local radio (experiment to see if the extent to which local consumers and businesses may wish
- to participate)
6.2. Client Promotion
As with many campaigns that we have worked on, we expect that clients will use their own forms of promotion to encourage consumers to take advantage of their offers. We expect this to be particularly true for private offers
Interested?
If sendmeasample.ca sounds like the ideal platform for promoting and distributing your samples and novelty items, give us a call at 1-800-422-1309. We’re looking forward to chatting with you!