The findings: Swag can help financial institutions (FIs) improve their brand awareness and acquire new customers—but for optimal results, they should follow some best practices.

Maximizing swag effectiveness: Promotional swag can be a fairly cost-effective way to boost brand awareness and recall. The Financial Brand reports three key practices can help improve its performance:

• Offering items that have practical value for customers, e.g., promotional face masks or hand sanitizer bottles.
• Tracking engagement using QR codes or similar measures. This can help FIs determine the popularity of a certain item or event, and know when to order more.
• Avoiding a one-size-fits-all approach for what clients would consider useful. For example, a branded wine glass may be well-received in Napa, California, but wouldn’t have the same value in, say, Utah.

Measuring swag success: The Advertising Specialty Institute (ASI) says certain items are more likely to be used, kept, and worn than others—which improves the return on this investment.

• For example, hoodies generate on average 6,100 unique brand impressions, while pens generate 2,000 and thumb drives generate 700.
• Most people who receive promotional items keep them for an average of five years. That lifetime then gets extended 55% of the time when items are passed onto others second hand.

And 83% of consumers who receive bank promotional merchandise are more likely to do business with that company afterward.

Key takeaways: Swag shouldn’t be a bank’s dominant marketing strategy, but it can complement a comprehensive campaign with cost-effective returns.

• When in doubt, ask your customers what merchandise they’d find most useful. For very popular items with higher value, it could be worthwhile to arrange a giveaway campaign that could also promote customer engagement—perhaps when you roll out a new product or service.
• As always, banks should analyze what’s working and what isn’t. This can inform which items to offer and how much to purchase.