In general, it's far easier to keep an existing customer than it is to attract a new one. Cultivating a long-term relationship with your customers is an important part of doing business. After all, it's your return customers who provide close to 80% of your annual sales and business. What's the best way to encourage repeat business and further orders from customers who have bought from you in the past? According to a number of studies in marketing research, customers who receive promotional items as sales incentives return sooner and order more than customers who receive coupons for discounts on their next purchase, and even more than those who receive no acknowledgement at all of their purchases.

Promotional items make wonderful thank you gifts to customers who make a purchase from you. When you send a promotional gift item along with an order, you're letting your customer know that you value their business. That message comes through even more loudly when the promotional thank you gift is sent under separate cover.

Promotional items can also be used to entice customers to come back and order again. One computer repair company leaves a free promotional mouse pad whenever they make a service call or repair a computer in house. Their return customer rate increased by nearly 50% after they began their marketing campaign ? and why not? They gave away a free, useful gift that put their company information literally at their customers? fingertips. The next time that they needed a computer upgrade or repair, who better to call than the name that had been before their eyes for the past several months?

Now that you know that promotional items increase your customer loyalty rating, how do you go about choosing the right promotional gadgets and toys to get your message across? After all, there are thousands of imprintable items available to help build your business image and brand recognition, and nearly any of them can be used to increase customer loyalty. The answer is to keep in mind the three main keys in promotional marketing. The promotional items that you choose should be:

-useful to your customers

-coordinated with your business in some way

-eye-catching and memorable

When you're sending out marketing materials with incentives to increase customer return traffic, you should choose items that offer higher value than items that you send out or hand out to increase brand name recognition. A key chain or imprinted pen is a great way to publicize your business, but it won't draw the customer response that you'll get with an item like a t-shirt, a calculator or a tire pressure gauge.

The more valuable your promotional gift is perceived to be, the higher the response rate you'll get from your customer base. If you key the cost of the promotional items offered to the value of the return business, you should get an excellent return on your investment. You can even offer fairly high value items like USB flash drives in longer term incentive programs keyed to number of orders or value of merchandise ordered. Promotional items are more than just gimmicks to increase name awareness. When you use them as part of a coordinated campaign to increase customer loyalty, you'll begin to see the real value of promoting your business with customer giveaways and loyalty gifts.