Sampling Program for Gift Basket Products
In October, I posted an article about using your marketing dollars effectively. I just read something in Gourmet News that led me to think about another way to use your marketing budget. How about setting up a sampling program so that your customers can come in and taste the products that you use in your gift baskets? You can either designate a specific day when you’ll have samples available for customers to taste, or you send out a notice to customers letting them know that you’ll be sampling something new everyday (to keep them coming in!).
Obviously, you’ll need to take some items from stock in order to provide tasting samples. Instead of looking at this as an extra cost of doing business, work this into your marketing budget. You may need to adjust other marketing activities to allow you to do this.
You should also take some time to assess how the program is working. If you keep records of how much you sell of a particular product each month, you can also keep track of how much of that product you sold after you offered samples to customers. You might even find out that certain products slipped in popularity after customers tasted them. This of course, would let you know that you should probably eliminate that product from your line.
3 comments December 4th, 2007
