You may have heard of kitting and fulfillment as a service, some of you will be very familiar with it while some of you don’t actually know what it is. So we wanted to start off with a quick overview.
“What is Kitting & Fulfillment?”. Kitting is the packaging or bundling physical promotional or educational content together that is related to a marketing or advertising campaign. The kit is then fulfilled by shipping it out to your target audience, which are likely customers, prospects or influencers.
Kits will typically include brochures, sample products, thumb drives, mugs or other types of promo items that support your marketing campaign.
The great thing about these kits and the process of fulfilling them using a 3rd party is that there are a large number of benefits to you as a company and more specifically the benefits of how this service will improve the ROI of your marketing.
How Does Kitting & Fulfillment Improve Your Marketing ROI?
We’ve selected four of the most common types of benefits related to improving the ROI of your marketing by utilizing a kitting and fulfillment service.
Save Time & Space
Kitting and fulfillment processes can be standardized allowing you to save a lot of time. Want to save even more time (and money)? Then outsourcing both your kitting and fulfillment needs will make that happen.
No one ever feels like the kitting or fulfillment of a product is a lot of work because it sounds so simple and easy. But the fact is that when you add up the amount of time it takes to source, collect the products, curate target audience lists, prep everything, pack it all together and ship the kits out you quickly realize how much time and effort it takes to make that happen. If you’re like most companies you can’t pull this off efficiently, plus you don’t have the bandwidth to get it done in a timely manner to meet deadlines.
Not only is the issue labor, but having to devote space for storing all of the items and having an area to assemble everything is likely not feasible.
Create Campaign Consistency
Being consistent is being efficient.
Kitting, if done under a structure of standardized assembly similar to what you find in manufacturing, ensures that each kit is the same as every other kit. This is how consistency can easily be achieved.
Your return on investment can accurately be measured under these conditions across the board including brand sentiment, brand awareness and recall due to the fact every part of the kit was held constant. Isolating variables to track ROI is the easiest way to get the most accurate insights.
Plus if you need to make a change or improvement to the kits being assembled it can be done globally to the process which keeps things efficient and maintains standardization.
Change Messaging Quickly
If you are using kits for in-store promotions it can be a major benefit having the ability to quickly update or totally change your messaging for that campaign. With a centralized process for kitting and fulfilling your in-store campaign kits you’ll be able to get changes to visuals, giveaways or other items out the door and into the store very fast.
Faster Shipping
The time it takes for a package to get from one location to another isn’t usually the longest part of the shipping process. For most companies it’s getting everything collected, packed and prepared for the shipment.
Picking, packing, and shipping kits takes time. So the more efficient this process is the less time it will take to get done. Unfortunately most companies aren’t set up to do this on their own which leads to longer overall shipping timeframes.
While there are many benefits to kitting and fulfillment we wanted to share those that positively affect the ROI of your marketing most so that if you are currently looking to better your return on investment then consider outsourcing your kitting and fulfillment to a 3rd party (like us) who is experienced and ready to provide that boost in productivity and results.