Measuring awareness and sales is critical when investing in sampling programs. Regular customer surveys about your sampling strategy are key to understanding if your current approach is meeting customer needs. Ensuring that every sample is delivered to the consumer most likely to buy your product is key to a successful sampling program. Whether you’re looking to raise awareness or are already at the top of the consumer radar, a sampling company quickly turns your brand into a tangible product. This method of selectively marketing a product also lacks information or feedback from consumers as there is no direct interaction between the company and the user after testing.
Allows brands to reach a wider consumer network. Allows consumers to learn about the product and experience free online samples delivered directly to their homes. Offering product samples to potential consumers is beneficial as it increases their visibility, gives consumers an idea of what the future holds, and allows them to be confident in their purchases. Simply put, giving away free samples puts your product right into the hands of your target consumers.
Whether you are an existing brand launching a new line or a brand launching your first launch, hiring a sampling company is a great way to create reviews and make some noise about your products. When it comes to awareness, sampling can inspire shoppers to talk about your products and brand both online and in person. Using influencers to promote your sample program not only builds brand awareness but also helps drive sales and website traffic.
The best product sampling company will work with your on-site and off-site teams to create the best consumer impact plan through sampling. When choosing a product sampling company, you want them to identify your target audience and take an orderly approach in product selection, positioning, and sampling. No matter what your product is, you need to know why sampling is a necessary part of your marketing or sales plan. To determine which sampling plan is right for you, consider your product and goals.
Perishable items are subject to multiple individual checks, while items such as potato chips, drinks, beauty products, and clothing can be shipped. If you want to keep costs to a minimum, sending samples individually packaged unique to your brand can be costly and not the best use of your budget. Consider ordering samples for new products as part of your launch strategy or products with higher margins.
From here, you can see if there is a surge in product sales after free samples are provided. Free samples are a great way to break this association and at the same time encourage shoppers to try new products (they will pay the full price). Brands such as Sam’s Club and Costco are known for using the power of free samples to build brand awareness and arouse interest in their products.
In addition to free marketing, other positive benefits include new and returning customers, as well as valuable feedback that your product reaches its goals. Experiential marketing is an important part of ensuring that customers buy your product for life and encouraging their friends to also buy your product.
Companies can also target their marketing campaign to sample products in a specific segment to try out a new product, get better market feedback, or collect user reviews and ratings. The Package app creates a user-friendly and straightforward process that allows users to choose from a range of current and free products that will be delivered directly to them for selection. By offering free or low-cost trial samples, customers can try a product from the comfort of their home and decide if it is right for them.
The purpose of submitting samples is to start a trial and start a conversation about your product online. These boxes are a great way for brands from every industry to communicate their products. Sample boxes through platforms such as Influenster allow brands to appropriately ship individual products and sample packages of selected products to a targeted set of customers.
With this type of sampling program, brands will include a sample of a new product in the shipment of an existing sales order. For new businesses, sampling gives customers a sense of understanding and experience with an unfamiliar product before they make a purchase. It’s a centuries-old strategy used by brands and retailers to get people to try a product in the hope that they’ll like it so much that they’ll buy it themselves when the sample runs out. A company that tastes food or drinks wants to communicate to consumers how the product tastes.
A food manufacturer who tries a product at a grocery store does not need to worry because everyone in that store buys the food and is therefore potentially a shopper. If a shopper knows they are getting a free sample when they shop online, but not in person, they have no incentive to change their shopping behavior.
Finally, some products are simply not suitable for in-store sampling, and this is where companies with multiple marketing strategies can play the most role. The best product sampling activities will determine the needs of target consumers and position samples to meet these challenges.
Researchers can determine the type of products to be produced or sold according to the specific needs of consumers. Whether an organization or a business wants to understand consumers’ buying behavior or the likelihood that consumers will pay a specific price for a product, market research can help draw meaningful insights. The main purpose of market research is to understand or study the market related to a particular product or service to determine the public’s response to the product or service. The market research process can be conducted by distributing surveys, interacting with a group of people (also called samples), conducting interviews, and other similar processes.
Figuring out things like why your consumers prefer your brand over others, or which of your products they prefer, can help you uncover important patterns and get you back every dollar per sample. When you take the time to identify target customers, you can also find the best products and services to sell to them. Once the main customers are determined, the next step is to determine which products and services meet the customer’s values. The most important thing to remember is that your business serves certain types of customers.
Marketing is customer-centric, and knowing customers and their needs will help companies design the products or services that work best for them. As we saw with the example of Merck and Amazon, your choice of your primary customer and your understanding of which customer values provide all the information you need to make the critical decision about how to organize your company’s resources, in other words, which modeling business to embrace.
