Capella University dishes out fabulous freebies. When I look over the swag (free promotional stuff) they’ve shipped, it seems they’re tuned in to the needs of their learners.

But a keen understanding of their demographic doesn’t equate to knowing diddly squat about me. So while their freebies score 100% on the IttyBiz Test of Great Swag, they’re at 25% with Crystal. Read on for what Capella sent, which item was head and shoulders above, and what this means for your business promotions.

And it’s not even my birthday

Capella sent only tuition bills while I worked through a four-course Instructional Design certificate. But when I returned for my I.T. degree last year, posh-packaged university-branded goodies started appearing in my mailbox: a travel mug, a car window sticker, a laptop mouse, and an academic planner.

Reviewing the IttyBiz guidelines, all the gifts are: relevant to and appropriate for the lifestyle of an adult learner, attractive in our school colors, inherently useful, match each other, suit my home office’s would-be decor, and they aren’t “shit”.

As student swag, they rock. For me personally? Not so much. Here’s the useful stuff I have no use for:

• Travel mug
  Since I work from home, my coffee journeys 17 feet from stovetop to desk (yes, I measured). I already have plenty of mugs AND a USB mug warmer to keep drinks steaming.
• Car window sticker
  I own a car, but I don’t put identifying stickers on it. Anonymity is bad for business growth, but good for personal safety.
• Laptop mouse
  I have a laptop, but prefer to use the touchpad.

But here’s the gem of the bunch. It rates max fabulous with me and I use it every day:

• Academic planner
  This isn’t just any ol’ weekly planner, it is completely customized for Capella learners: a pep talk page, a list of dates when their offices are closed, a divider at each of our oddly scheduled semesters, and address book pages titled “Key Capella Contacts”. Gold star stuff!

A second gold star goes to what came with the planner: stickers (see photo up top). Yup, the clever folks at Capella included a sheet of shiny stickers to mark my personal deadlines.

There are stickers typical to all college students: Pay Tuition, Register for Classes, Order Books, Assignment Due; but also stickers particular to online learning: Discussion Question Due and Responses Due.

And guess what? They send a new sheet of stickers at the start of each quarter, along with a pep talk letter gently urging me to persist.

Finding the Holy Grail

When I first saw the box, I was tickled they had popped something more in the mail. And when I opened the package and found the planner+stickers, I was stunned by how simply they made it uniquely theirs, while offering a useful way to make it uniquely mine-all-mine.

It took Capella four tries, but they accomplished what everyone hopes for when giving presents: a unique, emotional, memorable, and lasting connection between the gifter and the gifted. This is what we should expect from every piece of swag.

When I used my planner for the first time, I sensed their intimate understanding of the challenges involved in taking on college—again. I feel no one else would have found this ideal solution, and that they are cool people for handing it to me at no charge. I grin at the planner every morning because they got it so very very right. I tell everyone about their cleverness, and now I’ve blogged about it.

Your customers can—and should—feel that level of delight when they see and use the swag you’ve sent…but what are the odds of that? For Capella, it was 1 in 4…with me, anyway.

Pleasing some of the people, some of the time

Really, Capella did a stellar job selecting swag. Unfortunately, the gifts’ relevance, appropriateness, and the rest, is 100% subjective. Capella sent the right stuff, but I was the wrong person for 75% of it. However, I’d bet dollars to doughnuts the swag that was crap to me was the delight of other learners.

Somewhere out there are dedicated Outlook and PDA users that chucked my beloved planner with haste. Somewhere out there are coffee-drinking commuters who embraced their Capella travel mug and car sticker, and mobile laptop users that would cage match over their wee Capella mouse. One student’s Grail is another student’s Dixie cup.

But you and I have neither time nor money to send the right thing to the wrong person, let alone the wrong thing to the right person. Bummer is, it doesn’t look like the odds are in our favor. Still, we’re not helpless. We can carefully select the gift and the recipient, and also learn from other folks’ swag stories.

What this means for you

Using the story of my Capella swag as a guide, the best gifts come from:

• Uncovering the needs and problems of your customers
• Finding or inventing a variety of solutions
• Customizing with your brand
• Ensuring your customers can personalize their gift
• Packaging and shipping with obvious care
• Building in reasons to send something regularly

Every gift won’t hit the mark with every person, but it’s worth the extra time—and maybe a bit more money—to deliver something singularly delightful.

Et tu? Have you received excellent gifts from vendors, or even clients? Did you give away something that customers loved? Lemme know down below!

Swag: any corporate/branded merchandise given out for free to promote the company/brand (urbandictionary.com, #5)

Giving away stuff with your business name on it is a standard promotion tactic. Current customers and potentials will accept whatever goodies you’re handing out with glee. But wielding the power of free can easily demolish our tiny promotion budgets, so read on for tips on giving the right things to the right people.

Select freebies with care

The pains of buying the wrong stuff go beyond wasting money. Useless, ugly gifts will make your business (and you) look the opposite of good.

To help us spend wisely and avoid embarrassment, Naomi at IttyBiz offers this simple checklist for choosing good swag: the items you give away must be relevant, appropriate, attractive, practical, harmonious, and “not be shit”. The craptabulous stuff handed out at conventions and trade shows embodies the need for sensible criteria when choosing freebies.

With the typically worthless bits and pieces in mind, it’s easy to cast all swag as the enemy. Near the end of his rules for startups, Mark from Blog Maverick says, “NEVER EVER EVER buy swag. A sure sign of failure for a startup is when someone sends me logo polo shirts.”

IMO, unless you run a golf shop, polo shirts are a crap freebie because they ignore 3 or 4 (or more) of the Guidelines for Great Swag. But overall, swag is not a bad thing…bad swag is a bad thing.

Give what keeps on giving

If there was room for two more, I would add permanent and visible to the Guidelines. For example, unless you run a restaurant, why would you give away food? It doesn’t make sense to offer swag with a limited shelf life.

Like this: We could go gaga over chocolate bars with personalized wrappers, paying extra for a full-color logo with our clever tagline. Customers may love us for the yum, but after they’ve eaten the chocolate and discarded our promotional wrapper, what remains to remind them about our business? They won’t keep the wrappers just because our business info is on it. They won’t save uneaten chocolate bars as mementos to our generosity, either.

So instead of selecting a short-lived freebie, prowl the Web for promo items your customers will be thrilled to keep and display. When people are excited about a product or service, they eagerly show off the swag. For example, fanboys and fangirls share their love for Feedburner and Adsense with Google’s free laptop stickers.

Raving fans are worth their weight in Euros, so take the time to select suitable gifts they’re happy to save and share. And if you don’t believe your business needs a fanclub, read this.

Focus on shoppers, not collectors

When I worked for a federal contractor, one of the bennies was entry to limited-access expos like FOSE, where vendors hawked techno-yummies and gave away swag by the double handful. At least they used to.

At my last FOSE, vendors scanned access badges before offering their swag. Along with our name and office branch, they knew instantly our rank in the procurement process. If we didn’t have the clout to put money in their pockets, they didn’t put any freebies in ours.

Whether the vendors were frugal or stingy is up for debate, but I appreciate their decision to focus on potential buyers and bypass folks out just to collect bags of free stuff. When your resources are limited, it’s more effective to focus your promotional budget on exceptional swag for a few than to buy crates of cheap freebies for the many.

Considering the Guidelines for Great Swag and my two add-ons, what would you choose to give your favorite customers? Would you prefer to buy for the whole crew or just a few? Let me know down below!