Promotional marketing can have very positive and influential impact on a brand's reputation. To achieve a successful and professional fulfilled campaign, it is essential for brands to work with a reliable and experienced service provider. Badly executed campaigns can seriously damage the brand's relationship with a customer -- something that can feasibly take years to develop but just one bad experience to destroy.
Brands themselves will rarely be in a position to offer the human expertise or capacity to handle large promotional marketing campaigns. Recruiting to fill this gap is both expensive and time consuming -- it involves the hiring of new staff and then the required internal training. This is costly from a budgetary and customer relations point of view. Working with an outsourced provider can help brands overcome this shortfall. In addition to this, it means that brands themselves do not have to make full-time appointments for what is often seasonal work.
Even greater advantages can be achieved for brands if they look for a full-service provider that has the ability to offer contact centre support, storage, packing and despatch services, which can prove a very important service for a brand conducting a multi-channel campaign.
Although no one area is more important than the other, fulfilling a campaign is the last link in the journey. It is the final direct touchpoint between brand and consumer, and has to be flawless. A full-service provider is responsible for delivering the consumer their goods within a required and specified time. If this happens successfully then a consumer will leave his/her "journey" with a positive brand experience. Problems such as late delivery, an error in packing or other such mistakes will leave a negative brand impression for the consumer, and could be catastrophic for the reputation of a brand.
There is more to promotional marketing than just discounted in-store offers and brands must consider this and the ramifications of making errors. Established outsourced campaign handling providers, especially those that are part of a full-service offering, have immense expertise and will be able to provide cost effective solutions across a whole range of options. Although we hear daily reports of recession and the credit crunch, customer relations is the one area that brands and businesses cannot cut back on. After all, a loyal customer in these difficult financial times is like gold dust.