I’ve been thinking about using swag (“merchandise given away for free”) as a tool for user retention in the context of B2B SaaS products. Swag is everywhere, but I think it’s used ineffectively: e.g. attracting conference attendees to your booth (for awareness)
I landed at this after struggling with marketing to developers. I’ve built products for developers and seen how methods of marketing are ineffective at moving the needle. Emails land on deaf ears, articles written for the sake of SEO reek of inauthenticity. But developers react positively to swag - as evidenced by our Twitter timelines where a random user would post a picture of the swag that they received from a company.
Those who been in open source would recall how things even got extreme at Hacktoberfest 2020 when the hunger for free developer swag became a DDoS attack on open source maintainers.
I believe this extends onto any sophisticated user of B2B - and we want to nurture sophisticated users of our products (traditionally celebrated in “MVP/ambassador programmes”) - because they create content, are influential in their local online/offline communities, and are a great set of champions to have our own sides.
Note that this swag that is posted on social media is not the swag they get at conferences, but the swag that they got in their mail. Some companies have done this well. From what I can recall:
- Gatsby was the first one to run this at scale: every open source contribution was rewarded with free swag
- Supabase talks about how they use swag, primarily as a gifting mechanism
- Tailscale, the Browser Company, PostHog have tweets showing how they incentivise good behaviour
I’m interested in this topic because I’m interested in building B2B product companies and strongly believe that swag is a underutilised tool. I also - perhaps counter intuitively - believe that it’s never too early to invest in company branding, and swag is also an effectively tool to communicate the emotion and promise that you want your brand to have. And I love getting swag - not just for the free stuff - but because so much of our identities today are online, accessible only via screens, and swag lets me express that offline. I’m proud of the Postman sticker I picked up at their office in 2016, and the hoodie from Devfolio that says “Never stop building”.
Are you interested in chatting about this? Perhaps I got something wrong in the content and it needs a fix? Or you’re interested in doing this at your company?
I want to see more companies do this - and I’d love to chat if you are blocked on implementing this in your company. I’m exploring solutions - and would love to chat with you about your problems. I’m at arjun@attam.in or if you prefer - Twitter DM.
Scope of this guide
- Focused on swag for customers/partners, not employees - which should be evident from the blog title (“marketers”).
- Not interested in “bulk swag” that is shared on conferences. Bulk swag is impersonal, and often disconnected from the “good behaviour” in the above framing - and therefore ineffective.
- This guide is also not focused on “what is good swag”. The expert consensus, and intuitively so, suggests downplaying the logo, and showcasing the emotion your user connects with. New Relic’s “data nerd” case study and anecdotes from Holly Firestone are worth a read if you’re looking for that kind of stuff.
- The Tesla example is interesting because it optimises for the “feels” and wouldn’t actually work as a conference swag to attract booth visitors. For that, check out Flutterflow’s NFC card
Bulk swag for conferences or events and swag for employees are popular use-cases, and the vendors discussed below are solving them.
Focused on swag for retention, not awareness. We forget that, in the tech business, first and foremost, we’re in the business of retention - given that leaky buckets don’t fill up and corroborated by public companies reporting (and celebrating) their net retention rate.
Retention
Retention is hard to define generally, but for the context of this article, let’s use it to mean 2 things: “deepening the relationship that the user has with the company” and “incentivising good behaviour to repeat good behaviour”.
To pick a few examples from above: Gatsby’s example above demonstrates that neatly. Open source contributions get rewarded, doing that another time gives more rewards. Tailscale replies to positive mentions, like this one, and rewards participation in their user research through their newsletter. BCNY gave away stickers to Arc early adopters on the 1.0 launch.
The SyntaxFM x Sentry acquisition announcement extended this to just reward being in the community - following one of the podcast hosts, reading a blog post, listening to the episode. More loose targeting than the examples above, but still aligned to deepening the community bond.
The users incentivised were on the edge of being “ambassadors” - as demonstrated by their actions - and the swag pushed them over the edge. That probably resulted in an expression of their ambassadorship - as a tweet on social or a sticker on their laptop - thereby opening the door to other folks.
I think this is especially relevant to B2B SaaS that starts with the individual, free adopter - who champions and ushers the paid-tier team adoption story. Wearing a t-shirt or showing a sticker kickstarts conversations.
Is this a marketers job?
I debated about this, and the reason why I’ve put this here
- If community plays a role in marketing - then this clearly fits given the examples above
- Correlates to branding - fits in with marketing
- Does marketing own generating pipeline from free users? If so, this helps
- This relates to account-based marketing
todo: understand ABM, field marketing and fit Sendoso, Alyse, Reachdesk
Naming this
What’s a good name for this tactic? I’m calling it contextual swag for now.
Executing this
I’ve spent the last 72 hours digging deeper into how this can be done. My thesis was that more companies can do this - and perhaps it’s more harder than it needs to be.
I haven’t actually done this myself - and but I’m confident about the research I’ve done on this. I’m happy to modify this if you think I’ve gotten something wrong.
If you think you have a problem that you’d like help on (current solutions are inadequate) -
Overall solution
You need to collect addresses + print swag + manage inventory + ship to the customer. The last 2 are also called fulfilment. I dug into e-commerce to understand what different solutions look like.
- Collecting addresses can be done with a storefront, like Shopify
- How this works: generate a coupon code, add swag to cart, apply coupon code, share address info and check out
- The “share code and check out” flow is cumbersome - but works
- Some companies even expose the “merch store” for anyone to buy swag - but suspect that is not their primary use-case
- Print the merchandise
- Fulfilment: managing inventory and shipping
- I’ve left out “drop shipping” or printing-on-demand (POD - e.g. Printful) in this guide because I saw that PostHog moved away from it - based on their open source company wiki. I suspect that POD is expensive
The solutions below showcase trade-offs in terms of cost and effort involved. The effort involved is in order fulfilment and customer support.
The vendors below
1. Easy but expensive?: Hire a full-stack agency
Seems to be the preferred option for companies that have made it and take their brand seriously. Postman, GitHub are interesting examples - that use agencies like Imprint Engine and BSA, respectively. Both of them expose merch stores publicly, with at least, GitHub having evidence to show people actually order merch on their own.
Notably, Postman’s agency also handles customer support for this - which makes this truly full-stack.
Figma also has a fun merch store, however, I’m not able to tell if they use an agency (they probably do - or have hired for that capability in-house).
This approach is probably expensive - but results in merch that is designed by experts, and not UI developers dabbling in merch design as a one-time task. Gemnote is another such full-stack agency that does this (a YC company no less). I especially dig their work on tote bags for Substack.
2. Hard mode: Manage fulfilment in-house after getting bulk prints from a vendor
Get prints on t-shirts, stickers are a standard category for companies. CustomInk is popular in the US, Sticker Mule has built reputation on stickers. Every major geo has a local player (e.g. Printo in India). These companies deliver bulk prints (e.g. 500 shirts across different sizes) to a shipping address.
My hypotheses is that this is where most companies are - because they have existing relationships with these vendors, and implicitly assume that the bulk model for conferences/events extends to contextual swag. Doing this for events makes sense, but it’s a heavy tax when you don’t have e-commerce skills.
Supabase is doing this - with a Shopify storefront to get addresses on top.
3. Middle ground: Integrate a storefront with a vendor that does print + fulfilment on your designs
I would pick this option if you have some designers in-house that can pitch in with the merch design and you don’t want to manage fulfilment. This can be done with duct-taping a few tools - and I have 2 examples below.
- PostHog achieves this with a Zapier integration between their Shopify store and Printfection.
- Gatsby’s case study is a good read on how they integrated the GitHub API with Shopify, Mailchimp and Threadbird to achieve this.
- I like that Gatsby’s integration automates “when to give swag” (through the GitHub API) - which can be a blocker to achieving results at scale (e.g. your team forgets to give swag). Perhaps there are opportunities to automate that with the Shopify API as well.
I think the burden on customer support falls on PostHog - which is what their merch store wiki describes.
Conclusion
I believe we’ll see more offline channels open up given how crowded online is. There’s a template of CRM
Are we going to see more personalised swag? Imagine comic books like Postman - but generated with something like XYZ.
I’ve been thinking about using swag (“merchandise given away for free”) as a tool for user retention in the context of B2B SaaS products. Swag is everywhere, but I think it’s used ineffectively: e.g. attracting conference attendees to your booth (for awareness)
I landed at this after struggling with marketing to developers. I’ve built products for developers and seen how methods of marketing are ineffective at moving the needle. Emails land on deaf ears, articles written for the sake of SEO reek of inauthenticity. But developers react positively to swag - as evidenced by our Twitter timelines where a random user would post a picture of the swag that they received from a company.
Those who been in open source would recall how things even got extreme at Hacktoberfest 2020 when the hunger for free developer swag became a DDoS attack on open source maintainers.
I believe this extends onto any sophisticated user of B2B - and we want to nurture sophisticated users of our products (traditionally celebrated in “MVP/ambassador programmes”) - because they create content, are influential in their local online/offline communities, and are a great set of champions to have our own sides.
Note that this swag that is posted on social media is not the swag they get at conferences, but the swag that they got in their mail. Some companies have done this well. From what I can recall:
I’m interested in this topic because I’m interested in building B2B product companies and strongly believe that swag is a underutilised tool. I also - perhaps counter intuitively - believe that it’s never too early to invest in company branding, and swag is also an effectively tool to communicate the emotion and promise that you want your brand to have. And I love getting swag - not just for the free stuff - but because so much of our identities today are online, accessible only via screens, and swag lets me express that offline. I’m proud of the Postman sticker I picked up at their office in 2016, and the hoodie from Devfolio that says “Never stop building”.
Scope of this guide
Bulk swag for conferences or events and swag for employees are popular use-cases, and the vendors discussed below are solving them.
Focused on swag for retention, not awareness. We forget that, in the tech business, first and foremost, we’re in the business of retention - given that leaky buckets don’t fill up and corroborated by public companies reporting (and celebrating) their net retention rate.
Retention
Retention is hard to define generally, but for the context of this article, let’s use it to mean 2 things: “deepening the relationship that the user has with the company” and “incentivising good behaviour to repeat good behaviour”.
To pick a few examples from above: Gatsby’s example above demonstrates that neatly. Open source contributions get rewarded, doing that another time gives more rewards. Tailscale replies to positive mentions, like this one, and rewards participation in their user research through their newsletter. BCNY gave away stickers to Arc early adopters on the 1.0 launch.
The SyntaxFM x Sentry acquisition announcement extended this to just reward being in the community - following one of the podcast hosts, reading a blog post, listening to the episode. More loose targeting than the examples above, but still aligned to deepening the community bond.
The users incentivised were on the edge of being “ambassadors” - as demonstrated by their actions - and the swag pushed them over the edge. That probably resulted in an expression of their ambassadorship - as a tweet on social or a sticker on their laptop - thereby opening the door to other folks.
I think this is especially relevant to B2B SaaS that starts with the individual, free adopter - who champions and ushers the paid-tier team adoption story. Wearing a t-shirt or showing a sticker kickstarts conversations.
Is this a marketers job?
I debated about this, and the reason why I’ve put this here
todo: understand ABM, field marketing and fit Sendoso, Alyse, Reachdesk
Naming this
What’s a good name for this tactic? I’m calling it contextual swag for now.
Executing this
I’ve spent the last 72 hours digging deeper into how this can be done. My thesis was that more companies can do this - and perhaps it’s more harder than it needs to be.
I haven’t actually done this myself - and but I’m confident about the research I’ve done on this. I’m happy to modify this if you think I’ve gotten something wrong.
Overall solution
You need to collect addresses + print swag + manage inventory + ship to the customer. The last 2 are also called fulfilment. I dug into e-commerce to understand what different solutions look like.
The solutions below showcase trade-offs in terms of cost and effort involved. The effort involved is in order fulfilment and customer support.
The vendors below
1. Easy but expensive?: Hire a full-stack agency
Seems to be the preferred option for companies that have made it and take their brand seriously. Postman, GitHub are interesting examples - that use agencies like Imprint Engine and BSA, respectively. Both of them expose merch stores publicly, with at least, GitHub having evidence to show people actually order merch on their own.
Notably, Postman’s agency also handles customer support for this - which makes this truly full-stack.
Figma also has a fun merch store, however, I’m not able to tell if they use an agency (they probably do - or have hired for that capability in-house).
This approach is probably expensive - but results in merch that is designed by experts, and not UI developers dabbling in merch design as a one-time task. Gemnote is another such full-stack agency that does this (a YC company no less). I especially dig their work on tote bags for Substack.
2. Hard mode: Manage fulfilment in-house after getting bulk prints from a vendor
Get prints on t-shirts, stickers are a standard category for companies. CustomInk is popular in the US, Sticker Mule has built reputation on stickers. Every major geo has a local player (e.g. Printo in India). These companies deliver bulk prints (e.g. 500 shirts across different sizes) to a shipping address.
My hypotheses is that this is where most companies are - because they have existing relationships with these vendors, and implicitly assume that the bulk model for conferences/events extends to contextual swag. Doing this for events makes sense, but it’s a heavy tax when you don’t have e-commerce skills.
Supabase is doing this - with a Shopify storefront to get addresses on top.
3. Middle ground: Integrate a storefront with a vendor that does print + fulfilment on your designs
I would pick this option if you have some designers in-house that can pitch in with the merch design and you don’t want to manage fulfilment. This can be done with duct-taping a few tools - and I have 2 examples below.
I think the burden on customer support falls on PostHog - which is what their merch store wiki describes.
Conclusion
I believe we’ll see more offline channels open up given how crowded online is. There’s a template of CRM
Are we going to see more personalised swag? Imagine comic books like Postman - but generated with something like XYZ.