Most companies and nonprofits hand out awards and gifts yearly for several reasons. They could be for a holiday, work performance, growth in the company due to everyone working together, and more. Awards and gifts are a huge section of the market that many tend to overlook or not promote to their customers.
Twenty years ago, when we first founded our company, I wasn’t a big fan of promoting awards. In fact, I was very narrow-minded about it and never thought outside of the box about what you can achieve by promoting that you sell award items.
Years ago, and still even today, many companies look to engraved plaques to honor employees. However, back when we started, we worked to change customers’ mindsets on what an award could look like by promoting full-color sublimated plaques. A sublimated plaque could really allow you free range to not only design an award with text, but also add a background design that could have the organization logo, images of what they do, and more. This addition allowed us to really take things to a whole new level. Once customers got ahold of a sublimated plaque, they were interested in sublimated coffee mugs and more.
It is never easy promoting products or processes that are very new to your market. You really must allow yourself three to six months to promote the items and educate the customers on why they are the new best thing to purchase. Sublimated awards changed the full scope of what could be shown on an award, and the added value is that they are often quicker to produce. To this day we still sell several sublimated plaques, but recently many organizations are taking a different approach to awards with our company’s guidance.
As of right now, we have customers in 15 states and five countries we work with and we have built and managed more than 300 online stores for companies, colleges, insurance companies, and more. When we land a customer for smaller orders like awards, we promote creating an online store for them in which they can choose to earn a profit if they’d like. In most cases, many customers simply want to be able to offer their staff promotional options featuring the company’s logo. These products help the company cut cost on daily buying, allow staff to promote where they work, and create a unique opportunity to say thanks.
By creating websites, we can take a lot of work off the plates of the customer. Many companies now opt for gift cards or digital codes for their online store. Most companies give a minimum monetary value of $25 all the way up to $250 on average. This allows the employee to not only feel appreciated, but takes the stress off of the company to guess someone’s size and color they would want. Now the employee can choose exactly what they want from the online store and maximize the use of the digital gift card how they see fit.
Think about this for a moment — if you are a long-term employee somewhere working 10 to 20 years at a company, how many awards do you really want to hang up? Most people get tired of them and would rather have something they can really use. That is what makes selling promotional products or building online stores so special. It allows the organizations to not only say thanks to staff, but to do so with options that fit their budget needs while helping them make their employees feel appreciated.
Our company is now at a new crossroads where customers are purchasing heavy volumes of gift certificates, which is great! This past December we had one customer who needed to spend some money, but also wanted to take care of their staff, so they paid in full for $40,000 worth of gift certificates before the year ended. We have several customers throughout the year who spend on average of $1,000 to $10,000 on gift certificates for their sites.
When I look back 20 years later, I would never have thought a full-color sublimated plaque could not only lead to so many more sales, but grow what an award could mean to the future of my business. This is why you should always keep your eyes and mind fully open and never box yourself into what is possible.
