Maximize your marketing budget with digital product sampling

Traditional methods of product sampling (think Costco sample booths) have long lacked the actionable consumer data insights that drive successful brand marketing campaigns. COVID-19 has only exacerbated this shortcoming, with 78% consumers reluctant to try samples in-store.

Despite the pandemic, CPG product sampling marketing is still alive and well, and here to stay. Consumers always want to try new products, but through non-contact methods that they believe are safe. Digital product sampling bridges the gaps of traditional sampling by powering data-driven product experiences that not only ignite but sustain personalized relationships between people and brands. Digital product sampling reduces noise to accommodate changing consumer needs and expectations, both offline and online, during the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond.

So what would starting a digital sampling program with Sampler look like your brand? Let’s go.

1. Choose your digital product sampling goal: go beyond testing and awareness

Most product sampling initiatives support some sort of trial or brand awareness. Whether it’s through drive-through sampling stations, home party kits, or Amazon’s digital home trial sampling program.

What makes sampling digital products with Sampler unique is the wealth of consumer insights collected at every stage of the consumer journey. Sampler’s digital sampling solution enables brands to go far beyond simple trial and brand awareness and achieve goals at every brand stage (see table below).

These activities help build the kind of consumer base that allows brands to conquer their category. Consumers seek this kind of meaningful relationship with brands, as these statistics show:

80% of consumers want personalization from retailers
72% of consumers will not make a purchase without reading a review
TOS is one of the most trusted forms of marketing for consumers

2. Choose your audience

The next step in creating a digital product sampling program is to select a desired target audience based on your brand goals. With Sampler, you’ll have the flexibility to choose between sampling directly from your existing audience or tapping into Sampler’s high-value audience and getting your product into the hands of new consumers who match your target demographic. Let’s see the difference between the two:

By selecting Sampler audience you access:

A hyper-engaged audience active on all social and digital platforms
Potential reach of 50 million consumers
a 90,000 followers on Instagram74k on Facebook
700 consumer segments and over 19 data points per consumer, allowing brands to go deeper or more precisely in their consumer targeting

By choosing to sample for your audience directly you can:

Leverage your website’s organic traffic to boost product sampling
Integrate a sample CTA into your existing digital media buys (5x more users respond to an ad’s call to action with an example option than without)

Whichever audience you select, you’ll have full access to Sampler’s analytics dashboard, providing you with real-time program monitoring and information on:

Demography
Life habits
Family Overview
Interests
Ratings and reviews
Conversion to purchase

Sampler’s digital product sampling is also fully transparent with consumers regarding data collection processes and complies with all privacy and data security laws (GDPR, CCPA, CASL, CAN-SPAM & PIPEDA).

3. Choose an offer type

The next step in creating your digital sampling program is to select the type of offer you want to offer to your target audience: you will have the option to choose between a physical offer such as a product sample, a coupon physical or branded insert card or digital offer. If you’re working with a harder-to-ship product (think frozen or perishable items), consider opting for a high-value digital offer like a redeemable discount coupon instead. You’ll still be able to target your ideal audience while gathering valuable consumer insights and opt-ins to fuel your remarketing efforts. If you don’t know which avenue to take, our team of sampling specialists can help you determine which of these two types of offers can best help you achieve your brand goals.

4. Choose an experience type

Once you’ve established your brand objective, audience, and type of offer, it’s time to design your brand experience. If you want to deliver a product experience tailored exclusively to your brand and have 100% voice, you’ll probably want to opt for a fully personalized experience. With this option, you will deliver a unique branded box to your liking containing one or more samples of your brand.

If you’re a start-up brand running your very first digital product sample program, or just looking to put your sample dollars to work, you can opt for a sample swap program where you don’t not just share a sample box with 2-3 other brands that target the same consumers, but also divide and therefore reduce your shipping and fulfillment costs. With this option, you will always be assured of category exclusivity, so you won’t have to worry about sharing a box with competing brands and you can rest assured that your product has the space to shine.

5. Packing and Shipping

Now that you’ve designed your ultimate digital sampling program, you can leave us behind the scenes. Our team handles the packaging and shipping of your product samples to ensure they reach your target consumer safely. After shipping millions of product samples to over 24 countries around the world, we’ve become experts at bringing memorable product experiences straight to consumers’ doorsteps so you can focus on what you love most. : build your brand.

6. Ongoing campaign management

Digital product sampling is far from a touchscreen tactic, and the Sampler platform allows you to continue the conversation with your consumer, long after they’ve tried your product at home. At the end of your digital sampling program, you will receive an in-depth analysis of the full campaign, identifying key insights and recommendations from our team of sampling specialists to make sure you get the most out of it. We’ll help you uncover important patterns based on your program results that you can reincorporate into your sales and marketing efforts and even use to better define your target audience. If you’ve generated a large number of email opt-ins during your program and aren’t sure how to best leverage them, we’ll work with you to recommend effective remarketing strategies so you can move forward. the conversation with consumers until purchase.

7. Personalized remarketing and data integrations

Sampler’s flexible digital product sampling solution allows you to meaningfully engage with consumers long after they receive their sample. For example, if you start your digital product sampling journey with a brand differentiation goal, then you can leverage consumer insights for brand loyalty and promotion. Subsequent marketing initiatives can then be personalized and continuously improved with the data collected in your digital product sampling program through activities such as:

A tracking coupon to incentivize the first purchase
Follow-up survey to collect information after the trial
Ratings and Reviews: Ability to Syndicate to E-Commerce Channels
Pixel users to retarget on social networks

With integrations including SAP Customer Data Cloudyou can add the data collected in your programs seamlessly into your CRM system in a flexible, standardized and secure way.

Take away food

Digital Product Sampling gives you the essential consumer insights, campaign management tools, personalized remarketing tactics, and data integrations you need to build powerful relationships with the right consumer. Sampler’s flexible solution partners with you to go beyond simple tracking and awareness to brand relevance, differentiation, adoption and all the way to advocacy.

As Wayne Pommen, Senior Vice President of Affirm Holdings Inc. the toronto star“If 2020 has been a year of disruption and uncertainty…it will certainly be the year of building safety, security and long-term solutions,” and Digital Product Sampling with Sampler does just that. .

That of your brand digital sampling program will be the ultimate driver of long-term success.

To learn more about how you can turn your product sampling tactics into a complete 360° view of your consumer, Kelly Stewart, VP of Marketing at Sampler, presented the free webinar 5 Ways to Maximize Your Marketing Budget and ROI in 2021. Did you miss the event? It is available for see on demand in our training center.

Content paid for and provided by Sampler.