Discuss the fun task of marketing a t-shirt shop. Where to advertise, local marketing tips, word of mouth, press releases, search engine marketing, keyword advertising, magazines, etc.
I have heard many stories of people slipping in extras when shipping orders for online reatail. I am interested in such a thing and was wondering if anyone here has experimented?
I should also note that if your freebies are good and related to other products (I have 1" pin versions of some of my shirts, for instance) it can encourage people to buy other stuff that they might not have thought that they'd like. I've definitely had people tell me that they really loved a certain pin that was slightly related to their order, so they'd have to order the other shirt, now.
__________________ SEIBEI - put a monster in your closet.
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We don't necessarily do online retail orders, most of orders are on the larger side. But we always try to throw in some free pens, sticky note pads, mints, magnetic memo boards, etc., etc., etc. Whenever possible we'll throw in a few extra business cards as well.
we always put in a nice printed or cut vinyl sticker with ours. if it's an order of two or more, i'll put in a few extra stickers.
although they're not "extras", we have gotten many compliments about the way we present our product and the way its packaged. personally, i like getting and sending mail, so i like to dress it up a lil bit!
I totally agree with seibei on the necessity of relevance.
Oddica do this well (although to my mind, possibly slightly over-board.....the odds and sods are lovely, but certain things, such as the packaging, I suspect would only be possibly with large economies of scale....and might give the impression to customers that a wad of their money went on "freebies", jacking up the price. Even though this may not be true, it's a fine line between impressing, and retaining, a customer, and making them thing "this would be $5 cheaper without this stuff")
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yeah, I'm pretty jealous of Oddica's packaging - they posted a thread about it a while back, and I've done some research into similar stuff, and if you're prepared to buy the minimum 10,000 at a time, their packaging runs somewhere in the neighborhood of $0.40 per bag, so all of their extras and packaging probably run them about $1.50, though most people would think it was more...Oddica's prices are already terrific anyway, though, so hopefully people don't raise a ruckus about it...
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> probably $1.50? ... D, not sure about your future on the
Price is Right — it's about half of that.
for years I have shipped pins, postcards, and stickers (and tees)
to specialty retail and am lucky/fortunate to have all this stuff
sourced at a low price.
> neighborhood of $0.40 per bag
the small packages are ~25 cents, big ones ~40 cents.
a decent cardboard box from U-Line actually costs more.
I can see that some customers might scratch their heads and wonder
about the goodies and packaging. While on the other end of the
spectrum, we have customers who get their first package and
pledge to be Customers for Life.
dunno, different strokes for different folks.
I've been in the tee business since 1998, and when you get in the
trenches shipping to retailers, it's all about the bottom line.
Oddica was a chance to get away from the stressful/business side
of things, and do things a bit different without the usual fetters.
> probably $1.50? ... D, not sure about your future on the Price is Right — it's about half of that.
for years I have shipped pins, postcards, and stickers (and tees)
to specialty retail and am lucky/fortunate to have all this stuff
sourced at a low price.
> neighborhood of $0.40 per bag
the small packages are ~25 cents, big ones ~40 cents.
a decent cardboard box from U-Line actually costs more.
I can see that some customers might scratch their heads and wonder
about the goodies and packaging. While on the other end of the
spectrum, we have customers who get their first package and
pledge to be Customers for Life.
dunno, different strokes for different folks.
I've been in the tee business since 1998, and when you get in the
trenches shipping to retailers, it's all about the bottom line.
Oddica was a chance to get away from that side of things, and
do things a bit different without the usual fetters.
Don't get me wrong, I think you do things beautifully, and are one of the tightest ships out there.
It's just that some people might think...."Sweet zombie Jesus! This is a lot of cool stuff! How much did this stuff *actually* cost me!", even though it's not much at all.
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Little extras with your product 
