With the bite of the credit crunch beginning to take hold, more and more brands are looking for on-pack sales promotion incentives which save their customers money. This is where targeted, themed, 3rd party leisure, lifestyle and retail discounts come into their own. But, if you are tempted to save precious budgets by putting together one of these campaigns yourself, think again. It could prove to be a false economy if the whole thing unravels and you count the cost of featuring on Watchdog or Money Saving Expert forums. To be safe, check out Mosaic Marketing’s guide below.
First of all, you need to have built up a black book of contacts, useful people to know, some you might even call friends, who work in the leisure and retail industries, ideally over a decade or more of relationship building. These are your lifeblood, on whom you will call to get them into your promotion. With so many companies demanding their attention, who are they’re going to listen to - people they know already. These should be stored on a state of the art contact relationship management system. A good one will allow you to mail, e-mail and fax your base in an instant, whilst tracking every piece of communication for future reference. You never know when someone might need to pick up the thread of conversation when you’re not there. This would set you back in the region of £10,000.
Develop an insight into the zeitgeist of not only the moment, but the coming year - brands plan ahead after all. What are the issues of the day that will play on your consumers, and hence your potential customer’s, fears, hopes or desires? These will form the basis of campaign themes that will capture the public imagination, e.g. obesity, world cup, credit crunch, stay-cations, olympics.
Once you’ve worked out the campaign theme that will achieve your objectives and push the buttons of your target audience, you need to work out what partners will complement the theme. Do you already have the contacts? Is it a less common promotional offer for which you’ll need to establish feasibility and perhaps source data. Do they have the same infrastructure for this activity in all territories you are running the promotion, e.g. EIRE, mainland Europe?
Having established feasibility, what will your target coverage be in terms of numbers? This is partially determined by the universe of the leisure activity you are considering and how far people are likely to travel for that activity. You would be prepared to travel a lot further for a family day out (an hour or more) than for a hair cut (10-15 minutes). As a rough guide we would suggest that at least 300 venues in most cases, evenly spread across the UK would give good national coverage.
Now your partner base is primed, you need to prepare your plan of attack. You need to factor in enough time to not only meet your own production lead times, you need to ensure that you are approaching potential partners far enough in advance that they too have have time to plan this activity into their schedule. You will lose credibility immediately if you give people little or no time to respond to your proposal.
Your recruitment materials need to be designed to do several things:
- achieve cut through so the recipient actually reads it - this is a competitive marketplace
- explain the Features, Advantages and Benefits of signing up to the promotion
- spell out in simple contractual terms on how the partnership will work
- provide terms and conditions for the offer they are agreeing to accept (esp. with independent businesses)
- are there any free incentives you can offer the partners - samples, window stickers, equipment, money?
You will also need to consider how you will communicate all the venues participating in the promotion to the consumer. Chances are you won’t have room to list them on your existing product. Therefore, we recommend using a customisable online sales promotion search engine, with an approved postcode database available on license for c. £4,000 p.a. Ideally the system will be flexible enough to allow you to incorporate customer registration, security checks, a quantitative questionnaire, secure voucher generation, demographic analysis and reporting, all hosted on a robust, regularly backed up and impregnable server. Allow £10-15,000 to develop this.
Mailings in themselves will probably not achieve the numbers you need, so you’re going to have to undertake telesales. The scale of this operation depends on your target numbers, number of disciplines and deadlines. Also consider when your partners are likely to be there. If you’re ringing restaurateurs you’ll pretty much need to work restaurant hours; which invariably means evenings. Expensive!
Once you have all your partners safely contracted into the promotion, the fun bit of sourcing logos, artwork, copy, terms and conditions, proofing artwork and getting it approved begins. Remember that you are totally dependent on third parties to sign off material featuring their own intellectual property. Also, they aren’t always available when you want them, and your immediate priorities may not be the same as theirs, i.e. signing off this bit of creative is not their most pressing concern right now. So, again, factor in a realistic time frame for this because mistakes cost money.
Before the campaign goes live all partners, customer services and sales staff need to be fully briefed on when the campaign is going to run, how it’s going to look and what terms and conditions all parties are supposed to adhere to. You also need to have processes in place for offer redemption issues. If a consumer has a problem participating in your promotion (and they’ve followed the terms and conditions themselves) you need to do everything you can to ensure the matter is resolved courteously, professionally and quickly. Should the offer provider be at fault, you need to secure some form of gesture to compensate for the inconvenience caused. Very few customers thank you when things go smoothly, but, if they have a bad experience, they will tell the world including BBC Watchdog, Which? and Money Saving Expert to name but a few. The customer is always right, until proven otherwise.
Your role in delivering a third party offer is not over until the last voucher has expired. If you want to know how many people have redeemed the offers, your last job will be to ask all the partners how many they received and obtain feedback on how the campaign went for them with a view to future relations. This can be very time consuming and expensive.
So, in short, that’s how to deliver unparalleled third party promotional relationships. If you don’t have a few years to develop partner marketing relationships, an experienced team of recruitment specialists and a ready made white label promotions engine, contact the experts - Mosaic Marketing. They will look after all these elements for you and deliver the finished article for a fraction of the hassle and costs you would incur. That leaves you free to manage the bigger picture, which is what you do best, right?
This post is a homage to “How to make your own SUMMIT shirt”, kindly provided by our friend Robert Clay at DSP.
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