Offering a range of promotional clothing as business gifts can be good for business as it helps you deliver a promotional or customer loyalty campaign by providing a worthwhile reward to customers without having too much effect on your budget.

There are two classic ways to run campaigns using clothing as rewards or incentives. They are:

Scaling up incentives

This is where people get a reward of increased value depending on how much they spend. The lowest reward might be some sweatbands or a visor, then, for a higher spend, a baseball cap or an embroidered beanie hat. At the next level of spend you might reward your customer with a printed T-shirt and at the top level of spend they might receive a custom printed hoodie or fleece. This kind of incentive can also run as a loyalty campaign where the customer gets to save up ‘stamps’ or ‘vouchers’ for each purchase they make and then trade them in for a promotional clothing item. The more loyalty tokens they have, they better the garment they get as a reward.

Launch campaigns

To create media and customer interest you can use promotional items around the launch of a new product or service or to promote an existing one. Media goody bags can be a good idea here, but journalists are very unlikely to use promotional clothing so cans of soft drink overprinted with your promotional message, notepads, pens and gifts like printed umbrellas may be a better idea, all packed into a screen-printed bag that carries your launch message.

Take care to ensure that you don’t spend more on a promotional campaign than you will get back in increased publicity that you can convert into sales and make sure that any loyalty scheme rewards are durable and of good quality as customers soon feel cheated if you’ve given them shoddy clothing that doesn’t last.