The thought of giving away your product free of cost that you worked so hard to design is difficult to bear with. There are many costs involved in creating the final product, and when you give a free sample, you are basically putting the burden on your shoulders.
But don’t let temporary loss give up the idea of giving away free samples, because your free-of-cost items can generate a lot of profit over time. According to some studies, free samples are capable of boosting sales up to a staggering figure of 2,000%.
Free samples can be used to:
- Familiarize new audience about the product that you are offering
- Bond with customers and inculcate loyalty within existing customers
- Educate the shoppers about the product you are offering
- Welcome repeat customers, encouraging more sales
- Get your brand noticed at public events
Any of these above situations can help you create a stronger customer base and garner greater profits. However, you need to bear with the cut on the margin that you will give away as free samples. Before you get carried away this idea and start giving away everything as free samples, it’s better to understand the whole mechanism and how it works to keep your customers hooked to your brand. It is also important to learn about the connection between free samples and paying customers.
Here is the narrative that will let you decipher the science of free samples and how they can capture sales for retailers.
Your Purchasers' Psychology – Free Samples Lead To Paid Purchases
Whenever a customer decides to make a purchase, he goes through a process called buyer decision process. Shoppers initially realize that they either have a need, a problem or a desire for which they need a solution. They start considering options that are available to them. The decision that they arrive at is heavily influenced by factors such as price, personal preferences, availability, and so forth. Social proof also serves as a powerful tool that affects the decision-making process.
With so many factors to consider, a free sample comes as mute option for all the noise and persuades a consumer to make the purchase. Since consumers can try the product without having to bear any cost, they can experience the product directly, which shortens the decision-making process, increasing the chances of consumer buying your product again.
Free Samples Create Reciprocity
It is human psychology that when you do something nice for someone, they try to return the favor, which is also known as reciprocity.
When your business gives away free samples, your costumers feel entitled to do something nice in return. Usually they, return the favor by purchasing the product. Often, it’s not just the mere reciprocity that shoppers have to deal with but the pressure that they face when they see other clients returning the favor. Whether it’s the guilt or the reciprocity, you can benefit from the psychology by offering free samples.
Free Product Samples Strengthen Bonds
Giving free samples not only helps you target new audience, getting them to know your products, but also helps you strengthen bonds with your existing customers.
A research by Prof Miguel Gomez of Cornell University on wine tastings revealed that customers who participated in wine tastings were highly likely to spend more on winery with a high chance of buying from the same company again.
The study indicated that while free samples were the prime reason why customers decided to purchase from the business again, they worked in conjunction with good customer service and a positive atmosphere. Therefore, by merely offering a free product isn’t enough to seal the deal with every customer.
Offer Free Samples The Right Way
You have made up your mind that you would be offering free samples to invite new customers to try your products, target different audiences and compel old customers to make more purchases.
Before you start off with the sampling in your retail outlet, you should be wary that offering too much can affect your business in a negative manner.
When customers are presented with one or two products, making a choice becomes easy. But when you saturate the samples with many products, the ability to make a single choice turns into confusion. Customers are driven to making no choice at all because they are overwhelmed by the different choices available to them and their inability to decide which one suits them the most.
Therefore, it is quite important to have a sound plan in your mind before you begin with the free sampling of your products. You should consider the following points before putting up your products under the banner of free samples.
- Define The Purpose: You should chalk out your purpose of offering free products. You should question yourself about what you are trying to achieve by giving away free-of-cost products. Being informed about your purpose of free offerings will help you decide which product you should offer, when should you place it as a free item and for how long it should be available to your consumers.
- Define Your Audience: You need to be clear about your audience to which you want to hand out free samples. This will help you determine a way to reach out to the right consumers.
- Define Ways To Measure Success: You need to devise a plan that will help you trace your sample campaigns, and if they were helpful in realizing your sales goals. This would require a lot of strategic thinking and it means that you shouldn’t consider shotgun approach.
Try Free Sampling For Both Your Offline And Online Business
Multiple studies indicate that free samples create feelings of loyalty amongst existing customers while inviting new clients to make purchases, which means great business activity. However, this is possible only when you have some physical space or can hand out the products to your customers.
You can easily derive benefits of free samples in a retail store. However, if you operate an online store, getting benefits from this approach can be quite tricky. But this doesn’t mean that you should consider the idea at all.
You can start offering a free pack with the items that your consumers purchase to encourage repeat sales.
You can also consider other options that doesn’t mean reducing the influence of your original product. For example you can offer eyewear with free 5 frames.
In order to save your business from logistics costs you can come up with solutions such as “25% free on first order”, “free shipping” or tiny gift items packed along with the original product. You can offer a small product at a discounted price when visitors sign up for a newsletter or subscribe to your mailing list. This will help delivering the product to them while letting you have the information that you need to market more products in the future.
By choosing out any of these choices, you can analyze which strategy you should use to get your business the boost that it needs.
Has your brand offered free samples to consumers? If so, share your experiences and let others know which practice garnered best results for your business.
