How To Honour Your Early Adopters With Promotional Products

Hi! My name is Vasily, and I am the co-founder of the Merch38 platform. We created this business to help people and companies create their own merchandise for retail, marketing, gifting or any number of reasons to need branded products. I would like to share how we helped the creators of the MagicKids mobile application to thank their first users, their early adopters.

Early adopters are important to companies because they play a vital role in testing the first versions of a product and usually help developers better understand how people use the application, identify bugs, and fix user experience issues. To show their gratitude for their help and patience, MagicKids sent gifts and other bonuses.

All businesses may benefit from being generous with their customer base, especially when it comes to their early adopters. Including:

• Increased loyalty and satisfaction with the interaction between the company and the customer
• Increased recognition that comes when people are wearing or using a products with an eye-catching design that has your brand on it, spreading awareness to those around them
• Increased reputation as a trustworthy company that works with their users to create the best product possible.

So, what is MagicKids?

 “Magic Kids is an app that helps kids explore the world around them using augmented reality and machine learning,” says Anatoly Shcherbakov, the CEO of the MagicKids app. “For example, the application recognizes the surrounding objects through the camera and asks the child what the name of this or that object is."

Anatoly asked us to design and print exclusive T-shirts for his users. Using the MagicKids company logo as well as illustrations and characters from the MagicKids application, we turned them into a fun and beautiful image. Once complete and approved by the client the shirt was ready for the customers.

Here is what the finished product looked like:

To help users to order their free T-shirts, we launched and managed the MagicKids single-item webstore. They turned out to be so popular that there was additional demand for T-shirts beyond the early users, so the store was kept where anyone can now order the same T-shirt for a price and has become an unexpected source of income for MagicKids.

With the store up and running, Anatoly also asked Merch38 to create a certain amount of prepaid promo codes. So we generated special links and sent them to the early adoption users and anyone else that qualified. We made them very simple to use: just click the link and the price is set automatically to the promotion amount, in this case it was set at $0.00. The shirts then were able to be personalized. The customers could choose their own size and their favorite color, not just black as in example above, and were then sent out with prepaid shipping. Lastly, we also provided customer support for the merch store just in case anything went wrong.

We strive to keep the process very simple for our customers and theirs: Anatoly of MagicKids only had to approve the design, and users could place their orders in a few clicks. We handled everything else.

Also important to mention, to be budget friendly, Merch38 only printed the shirts after the order was placed, so the client only paid for that specific gift and there was no surplus should they not have all been claimed.

“It was so cool. I came to the guys with a need, and they satisfied it,” says Anatoly. “I didn't have to bother with anything at all – they took over everything, and they did everything as professionally as possible. At the same time, I paid only for the T-shirts that were actually printed and sent.”

We have also received great feedback from the early MagicKids users who are happy to wear their T-shirts and post pictures of them to their social networks.

"The experience was very easy. It was clear how to get to the website, order the store, and the process which it would be shipped to me. The key thing I loved was speed from getting the link, checking out on website, and delivery for the product", says Georgie-Ann Getton

Merch38 accepts orders from all sorts, including companies who want corporate merchandise, bloggers looking for additional sales based on their personal brand, or people who just want to print a T-shirt bearing their favorite picture.