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Free Samples Cart Promotion
Free Samples Cart Promotion

Offering free samples as a gift for customers.

Example

As a cosmetics brand, you can offer free cosmetics samples, personalized to your customer’s skin type, colour, preferred shades, or brands added to their orders above certain value automatically. It can be also a tiered promotion, for example, all orders above $30 get three free samples, all orders above $50 get five free samples, and all orders above $100 get ten free samples.

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Free Samples Cart Promotion

Free Samples Cart Promotion

Offering free samples as a gift for customers.

Example

As a cosmetics brand, you can offer free cosmetics samples, personalized to your customer’s skin type, colour, preferred shades, or brands added to their orders above certain value automatically. It can be also a tiered promotion, for example, all orders above $30 get three free samples, all orders above $50 get five free samples, and all orders above $100 get ten free samples.

Free Samples Cart Promotion

Offering free samples as a gift for customers.

Main Benefits

Offering free samples is a tactic that may be more beneficial than you probably think. The research shows that endowing an unexpected gift and simple gestures towards clients significantly influence buying decisions. It’s called the reciprocity effect which can be an effective tool to increase the average spent amount.

The key is to offer a free sample before a customer purchases (mention it on your website or in your store) – reciprocity makes your potential buyers feel obliged to repay and order from you or sometimes to order more than they intended at the beginning.

Program rules

Best Practices

  • You should personalize the choice of samples to send relevant samples, to convince your customers to buy the full-sized product.
  • If you do not have enough data to personalize your offer or not enough various samples to truly personalize the experience, you can also give your customers a choice which samples they will get. 
  • Mention the free samples upfront, even on the front page of your e-commerce store. This may be a deal breaker and make hesitating customers place an order. 
  • Do not send the same samples to the same customer twice, unless they chose to do so. 
  • Try to keep your samples inventory varied and change it up often, otherwise regular customers will not receive nothing new (and you will lose potential sales).
  • Set the minimum order value for samples reception but do not set it too high or unrealistic. If it is very close to what the customer was originally planning to spend (look at the most frequent basket values, not the average one), it may give him additional push to spend those couple of extra dollars in your store to get the freebies. 
  • This type of promotion is usually combined with other promotions and offers.

Learn from Leaders

Free samples promotion from Sephora

Sephora offers two free samples the customers can add to their order at any time (no minimum order value required). This works as a great incenitve to purchase from Sephora again if the customer likes any of the samples, which eventually increases the CLV and causes the customers to stay around for longer. The possibility to choose samples, instead of receiving random ones, minimizes the risk of receiving unwanted samples (e.g., light concealer for the customer with a darker skin tone) which may annoy customer and put them off your brand.

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