FAQs
Signing-up and the basics
Head over to Receive Samples, follow the instructions and enter a few details. Simple as that. We will always need an address, a valid email and the number of staff/clients at your site. We will also include questions that help us target you with the products you will want to receive.
After registering your interest, you’ll receive an email from our team, confirming whether or not you were successful in signing-up to the Gems Sampling network. We may ask you to clarify some information about your site.
Only after receiving our confirmation email will you be eligible for our sampling campaigns.
In short, no. However, many of the promotions we run have a set number of samples needed to be delivered per site. This means that if you have fewer members of staff, clients or customers at your site than the minimum delivery size, you will not be offered the giveaway. Usually, the minimum per site is set at around 100 for our sampling campaigns, meaning if you have fewer staff than this you’re unlikely to hear from us regularly.
When we’re sending out samples to sites in your location, we’ll contact you via email and offer you the chance to opt-in. Sometimes, we’ll call you to find out if you’re interested in a giveaway.
Not at all. You only receive the products you opt-in for, meaning you only get the samples you want to try. You can decline an offer on either the email that invites you to the campaign, or via the opt-in landing page.
Mainly just your address and contact details but there are other bits of information that help us ensure we’re offering you relevant products. We keep all your information safe and will never share it with any third parties.
We know you can’t always be around to take a delivery, so we ask you to nominate a secondary contact when opting-in for any giveaway. This means that if we can’t reach you on the day of delivery, there’s another colleague who knows what to do and be the office hero in your absence.
The brands we work with give away their products for free so that people can try new things.
We work on behalf of the brands to get them delivered to you. The feedback we receive is really helpful to the brands and helps them improve their products so, please do be honest when filling in surveys.
It’s often said that there’s no such thing as a free lunch, well normally there isn’t, but with us… there can be.
We’re happy to send you free products, but please do ensure you don’t leave them to go to waste and encourage your lovely colleagues to leave their feedback.
We wanted to make sampling as easy as possible for you, your colleagues and your clients. We have forgone the login area to ensure a seamless opt-in and delivery process, so no need to remember another username or password.
Do you run or manage multiple sites? Due to anti-duplicate rules we have in place, you cannot use the same email address for more than one sampling venue. This is to ensure we don’t offer you something that was meant for another site. If you can’t provide a unique email for each site, please get in contact with our community support team and they’ll be happy to help
Receiving samples
When we have a giveaway you’re eligible for, we’ll always email you first with the details on the product – as well as what to expect from the campaign. Sometimes if you haven’t opened or interacted with the email, we’ll give you a quick call to see if you’re interested.
You can choose whether to opt-in or decline the giveaway. You’ll never receive anything unless you opt-in
We work on a first-come-first served basis, meaning we’ll offer the products to everyone who’s eligible and when they’re gone, they’re gone.
If you’re too late, you’ll be told you’ve missed out. We’ll then put you on a waiting list in case we get anyone dropping out, and if we do we’ll be in touch.
If you see something you don’t fancy pop into your inbox, you simply click the link saying ‘No thanks’ or ‘Decline’ and we won’t contact you about that giveaway again.
Or, if you’ve already opted-in but need to back out due to an unforeseen circumstance, either call or email us and we’ll do it for you.
We work with lots of different brands, and some of them like to focus on certain areas or are aiming to reach certain types of people. When deciding who to offer a giveaway, we consider several different criteria to ensure we are reaching the consumers the brands are aiming for. No one will receive every giveaway.
If you haven’t received any communication from us in over 6 months, it could be you’re missing our emails. In this case, it would be advisable to add us to your safe senders list.
The opt-in email you receive will let you know the week the samples will be delivered, our deliveries usually take place between Tuesday and Thursday. Once we have the planned delivery date from our courier partners, you’ll receive an email confirming the date of arrival.
We’ll also send an update on the day of delivery with tracking, as well as inviting you to confirm your delivery the day after, ensuring no samples go missing.
Sometimes there can be a hold up with delivery due to unforeseen circumstances with our courier partners (traffic, vans breakdown etc.), or there was an issue with the delivery driver being able to reach you or your nominated Secondary Contact.
If you’ve been provided with it, please check your tracking data and contact one of our team.
Please be extra careful when opting-in to ensure there will be someone who can receive the products and that the address you’ve provided is correct.
We deliver our samples through a variety of different couriers and 3PL partners. Rest assured, we always choose the best method for the samples we’re distributing to ensure they arrive to you safely. Usually, the products will arrive in boxes, alongside posters, leaflets and any other promotional material the brand wants to provide you with. Sometimes they boxes may be chilled to ensure a product arrives at its refreshing best.
We endeavour to send you enough samples for most of your employees or clients, although we do under deliver to ensure none go to waste. For some campaigns you may receive samples you have to share between 3 or 4 people, for example a large bottle of fizzy pop.
In the unlikely event of damage to your samples, please contact us as soon as you can. We will either arrange collection of the offending samples, or help
When the samples arrive
On the day of delivery, you’ll receive a unique link to share with your team. This allows you to easily customise the message you send with your link, as well as providing you with flexibility on how you share it with your colleagues.
The link itself directs you and your colleagues to your unique microsite, here you can access the campaign survey.
Don’t worry if you’ve missed the email on the day of delivery, we’ll send through a couple of reminders throughout the week.
Not only this, but we will be providing unique QR codes for every giveaway we do. This means when you receive your delivery, you’ll have a poster to hang-up in a communal area – with information on the samples and a QR code to your microsite.
We love to see any photos you take during the activation at your site, whether this is you and a friend trying a sample or a quick snap of your setup; not only does it show you’re doing the right things, but helps us show the brand how much everyone is loving their products. Ambassadors that send in photos are over 3x more likely to receive samples than those that don’t. You can do so by using the submit form at the end of the survey, or by emailing us directly
You should receive a link to the survey on the day of your delivery, as well as a reminder the day after it has arrived. Sometimes these emails go into the spam folder, so please do check here first. If you still haven’t received the feedback link or are unable to find it, contact us at community@gems-sampling.com
We keep the survey open for two weeks after delivery, allowing you, your colleagues and clients plenty of time to leave their feedback. We are unable to re-open the survey for you unless there are extenuating circumstances, or the campaign is extended past its original date.
Technical difficulties
For some of our workplaces, universities or gyms; their network’s firewall prevents them from accessing certain websites. If this is the case, please contact your IT department to get both gems-sampling.com and sampltech.com domains whitelisted to ensure the smooth running of our campaigns. In the short-term, please forward the survey link to your colleague’s personal telephony devices and use your own mobile network.
If you’ve been contacted by one of our community support team, or haven’t had a reply to an email; please check your spam folder. To ensure our emails reach you, please add both the gemsatwork.com and gems-sampling.com domains to your organisations safe senders list. If this still doesn’t fix any delivery issues, please contact your IT team
We have discontinued our member’s area to both streamline our delivery process, and make it easier than ever before for you and the team to get involved in our campaigns
There are a few of issues some of our Ambassadors have with our opt-in emails
- The campaign is closed and all samples have been allocated, you should see a ‘Sorry, this campaign is finished’ page upon clicking ‘Opt-in’ on the website. If not, please contact our team using the details at the bottom of this page
- Your browser is out of date and doesn’t support our opt-in form, meaning the widgets used on the page aren’t loading correctly. Please update to a more recent web browser and try again
- Your company firewall is preventing you from being redirected to our website. If this is the case, plwease contact your IT department to whitelist both the gems-sampling.com and sampltech.com domains
As our website is very interactive and includes a lot of video content, some older browsers and slower internet connections may struggle to load certain pages. Please ensure your software is up-to-date. If the issues persist, contact our community support team who will forward your feedback onto our web development team
