Brand awareness, lasting impressions, and positive opinion – these are the goals a company strives for when dealing with prospects and even existing customers. According to Stefanie Marrone in her article on The Social Media Butterfly blog entry, “It’s incredibly important that each touchpoint your target audience has with your brand is truly reflective of your brand.”
Care should be exercised with the company image that is being projected to consumers. This encompasses the company office, the logo, the website the promotional items that are being given out to prospects, or swag. Swag stands for “stuff we all get” – giveaways, promotional items, and free samples that are handed out to employees, and potential and existing customers.
For companies that aim to showcase and promote their business, branding, and company culture, choosing the appropriate and fitting swag is essential. This niche industry is what Swag.com is made for.
What is Swag.com?
Swag.com is a procurement, fulfilling, and inventory utility, offering this all-in-one solution with a comprehensive product catalog and services covering branding and design, production, storage, shipping, and distribution.
Customers of Swag.com can choose from the website’s vast and wide-ranging catalog of products; these can then be personalized and bespoke to the needs and branding of the company and can be packaged as customized gifts, swag boxes, or promotional items. Swag.com also offers storage of the swag items, ready to be shipped out and distributed when the client needs the items to be shipped.
How Does It Work?
On the range of products, Swag.com’s products cover categories such as home, apparel, hobbies, stationery, accessories, display items, drinkware, bags, travel essentials gadgets, tech accessories, wellness, trinkets, sweets, and items that could be good for trade shows, holidays and summer trips.
Swag.com also offers a swag box-building feature where swag boxes can contain several products chosen from the catalog. One Swag box, for instance, can contain a notebook, a pen, a mobile device stand, and a premium thermal bottle. All of the contents of the boxes can be personalized or customized with a company’s logo, branding, or promotional slogan. They also offer themed boxes and the price ranges from boxes below $25.00 to below $200.00.
Swag.com offers storage via its fulfillment centers and provides customers with an inventory management tool in case customers want to defer sending out the swag boxes.
On shipping and distribution, once a customer is ready to send out the gift items, the distribution can be arranged on the website. Items can be arranged to be delivered in bulk in one location or to multiple delivery addresses. Swag.com takes care of logistics even for multiple recipients. They handle delivery worldwide offering competitive shipping rates.
Swag.com proffers an end-to-end solution in creating, maintaining, and reinforcing brand identity that is poised to garner any company potentially more impressions, definitely a step above print or social media advertising.
Target Market
In terms of marketing and showing how a company values employees and customers, something tangible, like tokens and gifts, is still essential.
The specialized service that Swag.com offers could be very beneficial for employers and companies who would:
- Welcome new employees and provide tokens for onboarding;
- Show appreciation for a dedicated workforce, especially for those in a hybrid or remote work setup;
- Give swag boxes to leads and prospects and increase the chance of converting them to customers;
- Provide tokens of appreciation for participants of events, meetings, and seminars, be it online or face-to-face;
- Reward outstanding or new customers.
Integrations with Other Platforms
Swag.com allows integration with the following applications:
- IntelliHR – Integrating Swag.com with IntelliHR can let a company’s HR department give employees, both existing and new, tokens to celebrate important milestones and show appreciation.
- Zapier – Zapier can be used to allow Swag.com to integrate with BambooHR, Marketo, Hubspot, or Hopin to automate the sending of gifts to employees, clients, or leads.
- Swag.com API – Swag.com has an API that can be used to trigger automatic sending of marketing items.
Pricing
Pricing for products depend on the products that will be included in the swag boxes. The cheapest items from the product catalogue are the following: pop eraser ($0.36 to $1.12), small notepad ($0.56 to $2.71), pens ($0.65 to $0.88), and mini-lip balm ($0.69 to $1.04). On the other end of the spectrum, the most expensive items in the product listing, at the time of writing this article, are the following: collapsible kayak ($1,050.77 to $1,127.70), paddle board ($700.00 to $769.24), stove bonfire and stand ($381.67 to $431.67), electric massage gun ($377.50 to $560.29) and Fitbit smartwatch ($258.41 to $269.17).
There is a minimum number of items per order. For the least expensive items, the minimum number per order ranges from 250 to 500 pieces. For the items on the pricey side, the minimum number of orders ranges from 5 to 25 items per order.
Shipping and storage fees are dependent on the mode of delivery: bulk or multiple individual parcels. For storage, the company will only charge for the safekeeping of items that are already in the fulfillment centers. Storage is free for products under 1oz. For unboxed items heavier than 1oz, the fee is $0.01 per day. For boxes, the fee is $0.05 per day.
Swag.com also charges pick and package fees to cover the procurement of products off the shelf, packing of items for shipment, and labeling of parcels. For orders with less than 20 products, the fee is $1.75 for the first order and $0.55 for every additional product. For orders with 20 or more products, the fee is $5.00 for the first box and $14.50 for every additional box.
Pros and Cons
Here’s what makes Swag.com an excellent tool for sending swag boxes:
- An extensive list of products to choose from;
- Support for end-to-end delivery
- A vibrant, chic, and modern website that enhances the swag assembly experience
- Option to store items and boxes before distribution
On the other hand, there are some drawbacks to the services that Swag.com offers:
- Limited options for integration;
- Pricey products, storage, and shipping rates
- Negative reviews on issues including prolonged production distribution time and delays in delivery
Conclusion
Swag boxes are part of a fresh and new marketing landscape. What Swag.com has tried to accomplish is leverage this trend and make it better and automated. But the solution does not stop there: they incorporated all aspects of the process, from production and procurement, to storage up to delivery and distribution under one solution. The whole experience is seamless. In these interesting times where a lot of adverse factors put a strain on consumer-business and employer-employee relationships, according to Jeremy Parker, one of Swag.com’s founders, “When people are disconnected, swag is the great unifier.”
