Choosing promotional gifts for a marketing campaign involves so many different pieces of the logistics puzzle. Once you’ve narrowed down your prospective market and decided on a variety of promotional items that are appropriate for your campaign, you have to consider other factors – like how your delivery method for the promotional items will affect your choice of item. One of the most common methods of promotional gift fulfillment (getting the goods into the hands of your gift recipients) is through the mail. If you’ve decided on a direct mail marketing campaign, one of the factors you’ll need to take into consideration is how well your promotional items will weather the vicissitudes of the UK postal system.

Postal costs and fulfillment costs should be figured into your promotional budget. If you’re sending out thousands of promotional products through the post in a mass market campaign, it’s important that you consider both the cost of the packaging and the postal costs as part of the per item cost of your promotional items. When you use promotional items in a redemption and fulfillment campaign, your postal and packaging costs, as well as any other costs associated with fulfillment – the cost of your employee time in packaging and running to the post office, for example – should also be counted into the cost of your promotional items and campaign.

When choosing promotional items for mail campaigns, there are several things to consider. If you’re sending out a mass market direct mail campaign, you’ll want to consider:

- cost of the item
- packaging for the item
- weight of the item

Excellent business gifts for mass mail marketing campaigns should be low weight, low cost and easy to package. Some of the best choices for direct mail campaigns include:

- Printed refrigerator magnets generally only cost pennies per piece and weigh only a couple of ounces. Since they’re seldom breakable, you don’t need to take any special precautions with packaging them for the mail.
- Stick note pads are very popular promotional items for mail campaigns. They’re inexpensive, lightweight and every pad of sticky notes has the potential of being seen by several people besides the original recipient.
- Informational pamphlets aren’t often considered as promotional items, but they can be among the most useful items that you can send out. In order to be considered
“promotional items” rather than promotional materials, they should offer important information about a general subject other than your own company’s products.
- Calendars have been among the most popular promotional items for decades. Whether you choose wall calendars, pocket calendars or desk calendars, they’re useful to everyone, flat and easy to mail and weigh very little.
- Key rings are another item that nearly everyone can use. Depending on the style that you choose, they’re lightweight and can be mailed in an envelope to keep postal costs low.
- Candy mints are growing more popular as promotional items. Whether you choose pillow boxes, tins or cards with candy mints, you’ll have a promotional item that mails easily and is low cost.

If you’re using a redemption method of fulfillment for more expensive promotional items, make sure that you choose packaging that will stand up to the rigors of mailing so that your items will arrive at their destination intact.