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Online Promotions To Support Your Brand And Build Customer Loyalty

By Cyndi Walker

Republish: EasyPublish™
Published: 26Jun2009
Word count: 528
Viewed: 280 time(s)

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Online promotions continue to gain momentum as marketing budgets shift from conventional advertising methods toward more efficient promotional channels. Interactive and cost-effective, they can include sweepstakes offers, contests, and online instant win games. The challenge is to leverage online promotions in a way that effectively strengthens your company's brand while building loyalty in your existing customer base. It is not a simple task.

Below, we'll explore how you can use online promotions to build your customer database while reinforcing your brand. We'll also explain how web-based sweepstakes and games of chance can help your company achieve your marketing objectives. Lastly, we'll briefly describe how you can easily manage the budgetary risks of online promotions.

Online Promotions Attract Demographic Information

Demographic information is a key asset for consumer-driven companies. All markets are comprised of groups that can be segmented by ethnicity, income, education, and a host of similar data points. Once such information has been compiled, purchasing trends emerge.

Online promotions, such as interactive sweepstakes and games of chance, can be used as a marketing tool to attract demographic data. Whether entrants are driven to your promotional site by a retail point-of-sale call to action or wide-scale mail drop, they are required to enter personal data to participate. This information can be stored in a database which can then be used to further market to your target demographic.

Branding And Customer Loyalty Through Online Promotions

If crafted well and executed properly, interactive promotions can reinforce your company's branding objectives. However, too often, companies will deploy them haphazardly without giving sufficient thought to their long-term effects. Online instant win games and sweepstakes offers should fortify your company's winning proposition. To be sure, it is easy enough to offer prizes and incentives for your target market's participation. However, doing so in a way that yields long-term value is far more complex. It requires the sure hand of an experienced online promotions agency.

Just as branding objectives can be accomplished through a shrewd deployment of online promotions, so too, can sweepstakes and games of chance develop stronger customer loyalty. However, it is critical that you match your promotional objective with the campaign. For example, suppose your objective is the development of customer loyalty within your market. In this case, offering free samples of your product would be less appropriate than online promotions focused upon points-based rewards.

Managing The Promotional Risk

Companies that are considering promotional sweepstakes and instant win games are often concerned about their potential exposure to budgetary risk. This is especially true for wide-scale online promotions deployed throughout a broad market as well as promotional campaigns in which the prize value is significant. This risk can be easily managed. Your company can secure promotional risk coverage that insulates it from loss. By using such coverage to smooth the risk variance of online promotions, you can offer more attractive prizes and incentives. In doing so, your company will attract a far greater number of registrations.

Online promotions are a valuable marketing strategy for reinforcing your brand while increasing loyalty in your customer base. The key is to partner with an experienced promotional agency that can design campaigns for maximum long-term value.

Promotional Currency (PC) is a digital promotions firm that merges digital technology, artist licensing and promotional risk coverage to deliver turnkey, fixed-cost solutions that meet the unique needs and budgets of the brand marketing or b2b marketing client. Among product offered are: unique customer loyalty programs, promotional incentives, online promotions and mobile promotions.

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