Waste the Customer’s Time at Your
Own Risk
Trying
to squeeze an extra dollar out of a sale–or even giving away free samples–isn’t
always a smart strategy.
EXPERT OPINION BY HOWARD TULLMAN, GENERAL MANAGING PARTNER, G2T3V
AND CHICAGO HIGH TECH INVESTORS @HOWARDTULLMAN1
Jun 3,
2025
Many years ago, we
looked at the business plan for a company that hoped to install high-volume
printers at the end of the production lines for various online retailers. The
plan was that these printers would create personalized greeting cards selected
by the gift giver to be inserted into the packages. At the time, the only
messaging that even the most advanced sellers could offer to gift buyers was
some poorly printed basic sender information on the outside of the packaging,
generated by dot matrix mailing label machines.
As often as not, most of
the people on the receiving end of these packages had no idea of who had sent
the contents or why, even after they opened the packages.
The entrepreneur’s
thought was that gift givers would be offered the opportunity to add a card
they personally selected for a few incremental dollars when they ordered, along
with a message to the recipient. Given that the greeting card industry is a multi-billion
dollar business and one which continues to invent new occasions and compelling
reasons to send cards and presents, it seemed like a case where the consumer
demand would be substantial, the sellers would be happy to make the additional
revenue per sale, and the cost of presenting the idea and the opportunity to
millions of buyers would be trivial. They were already online at their computer
or phone making a purchase.
But the idea never got
off the ground for a simple reason: the retailers hated the idea of doing
anything that extended the shopping experience because their greatest nightmare
is shopping cart abandonment. Nothing else causes them more angst than watching
prospective buyers bail before they hit the purchase button. Asking the
customer to spend even two minutes more to select and personalize a gift card
would undoubtedly lead to anxiety, confusion and indecision. The net result
could well be that the buyer decides to bag the whole sale.
As much as the
entrepreneur argued that the customer was already so invested in the
transaction that he or she would certainly stick around, the merchants across
the board knew better – they lived and died every day with metrics and
measurements that were focused on such minutia as site navigation issues,
lengthy turnaround times for data entry, the adverse impact of pop-ups, and
even “free” add-on offers.
They also knew how
fragile the online connection was and how fleeting the attention, interest and
commitment of the consumers could be. Any number of external factors could
interrupt or interfere with the ongoing action and result in a buyer ghosting
the whole deal. So, it was a big and consistent “No.” This was only one
of many instances where online merchants unsuccessfully experimented with
offers, incentives, and other inducements to try to increase the average
purchase dollars per sale. “Get ‘em in and get ‘em out” was the prevailing
motto.
So, when I was
approached by the founder of Swish Brand Experiences I honestly wasn’t very
interested in the company. Swish inserts free samples of new products from
firms like Danone or KraftHeinz, into the orders of online shoppers –
essentially a surprise – along with the items they actually ordered. But, in
fairness to their business plan, these guys have thought through and eliminated
all of the obvious obstacles that I had encountered in previous versions of
similar ideas.
First of all, because
everything is behind the scenes and unknown to the online purchaser, there’s no
delay or interference with the transaction. Their approach is quite clever and
basically inserts a direction to the selection system upstream that looks to
the seller’s computer just like an additional item in the original order –
albeit with a zero price – and that item is pulled and packed right along with
all the other products that were actually ordered by the consumer.
Second, because their
system is fully integrated with the seller’s databases, Swish’s program knows
all the available demographic, prior history, and current purchase data about
each buyer in real time. Its algorithms can instantly decide which buyers should
receive which sample products, based on who they are, what they’re presently
buying, and what they’ve purchased in the past. Multiple stocks of different
samples can be cleanly included in the program because the end recipient only
sees the sample the system selects. These “smart” samples are sent to the
right targets without any of the waste typically associated with sampling
programs, which provide their sellers with only the faintest idea of who
theoretically may be offered their goods and offer no demographic information
at all on who actually took the product. Many of the cosmetic companies include
small free samples of new products in shipped orders, but the entire effort is
mostly random.
One of Amazon’s greatest
and most cost-effective tools for sellers and buyers is the fact that a buyer
of some item last week almost never sees a repeat ad for the same item because
Amazon knows that you already bought it. They may offer it to you again sometime
in the future, but they won’t waste your time and their sellers’ ad money
showing you banner ads for the same thing over and over.
Finally, because the
sample is so well targeted, there’s a tremendous emotional uptick in the mind
of the end user. Not simply that they are getting a surprise, because surprises
in business are rarely good news. And it’s not merely that it’s free; today
even free isn’t cheap enough because there’s no good price for a crappy
product. The bottom line is that the excellence of a “gift” or lagniappe like
this lies in its appropriateness rather than its value.
This is a smart, simple
and painless way for merchants to surprise and delight their customers and to
spend their sampling dollars in an intelligent, automated and highly effective
way.