In this piece, we are looking for encircling bombs to explode your sales promotion strategies in 2022. Every business has competition, peak and drip season, and a lack of product awareness or qualms during new product launches.
Entitlement to a big brand is merely insufficient to sell your goods. The competition is fierce amongst brands, and big brands running multi-million-dollar advertising campaigns steal all the product sales. But does that mean your brand could not skyrocket the sales?
Hindrance and unawareness keep several brands away from using these strategies even today.
But before diving into those techniques, first, let’s understand Sales Promotions:
Any marketing aggregation made in the effort to promote sales for a specific period or as a campaign should be termed as sales promotion. For example, the Black Friday sale is the biggest campaign globally for product sales promotion during the festive season.
Sales promotion is carried out through media and non-media channels, such as coupons, contests, point of purchase displays, cash prizes, freebies, etc. They are ideally run-on different places such as online, websites, retail stores, modern trade outlets and company-owned stores.
Types of Sales Promotions
There could be many ways for sales promotion, but several globally accepted ones are mentioned below. Not all fit every business. There are several ways to identify which sales strategy works for different businesses, which shall be discussed later in the blog.
BOGO
Brands’ most famous sales promotion strategy is “BOGO”, or Buy one and get one free, for product awareness. Customers can be given one free product to the same Consumer or give extra to friends or family and build a customer base through word of mouth.
Cash Rewards
Cash rewards are given to the customers for brand loyalty and customer retention. Several fintech companies can offer cash rewards in real-time. The three simple steps by scanning the QR Code made cash rewards one of the most famous customer rewards methods in recent years.
GIVEAWAYS
Offering high worth value products as a lucky draw campaign for consumers is another premium way for customer retention and for promoting brand loyalty. The rewards types include high-value gadgets, restaurants or vacations coupons.
Freebies
Offering a small free product when the Consumer buys a higher value of your mainstream products is another way to increase sales. This strategy helps sales at a lesser cost to the company on inventory or revenue.
Subscription
Different subscriptions to online platforms or travel coupons have become widely accepted reward options for customers. Providing consumers with subscriptions from Netflix, Uber, or Spotify is a trending gift option for sales boost.
Discount Sales
Giving the customers a percentage discount from the actual cost is still the top sales promotion method. The owner can decide the percentage discount as per their inventory and helps in clearing old stock volumes to make space for the newer stock inventory of products.
Early bird or free trials
This promotion strategy is given to first-time users or buyers as a special discount to create a hook for your products or services. These promotions work best for repeated purchase of products – once the Consumer like the products, they will be willing to buy them at regular intervals at their original cost.
Benefits of Sales Promotion
There are several long-term payback benefits your brand can achieve through sales promotion;
Acquire First Party Customer Data
There will always be a step in your system/technology backend to register Hygenic customer data regardless of the type of campaign you choose to run your sales promotion. Acquiring first-party consumer data helps you know your customer base, understand your audience personas and enable companies to retarget or remarket.
Learn more about Sproxil Customer Data Platform to acquire first-party consumer data.
New Product Launch Awareness Program
Haven’t you seen advertising of large companies during a new product launch? New customers require incentives to buy, while existing customers may be committed to their usual products. Choosing any innovation to promote your new products is a great way to increase sales of new products without spending millions of rupees on advertising.
Calculate Brand Value
The rate at which a company acquires new customers is one of the critical criteria to determine the brand value of any entity. Once the current and future customers are valued, it will give value of the brand. The sales campaign helps you find out the customers year-on-year and helps calculate the brand value, and thus helps plan campaigns.
Refresh Decay Data
Data decay is natural; if you leave data unattended for too long, it will be of no use in probably less than a year. This means a considerable loss for your business or revenue. Sales promotion helps you keep your data fresh for B2C customers, which prevent revenue leakages by sending your offerings or rewards to the right audience.
Promote Brand Loyalty
Fostering brand loyalty is the key objective of sales promotion. Once your brand interacts with or engages your customer differently or innovatively, the people will keep returning to your brand. So, choosing the right campaign creates lasting impressions in buyers’ heads about your company’s product.
Sproxil’s innovative strategies for Sales Promotion
Post, the advent of technologies like Gamification, Artificial Intelligence, QR Code created a stir in providing engaging campaigns to customers. Such ideas are bundled with personalized branding to create an outstanding CX customer experience and long-lasting impressions.
Few of the latest and tried and tested sales promotion strategies implemented in the market. Check out these campaign ideas.
QR Code Coaster Engagement [Value Added Products or VAP]
Millions of consumers visit the liquor store to buy their favourite liquor. Ideally, liquor products are added with Value-Added Products or VAP to make the purchase lucrative to consumers. But, in the VAP, customers get special engagements in six different ways through QR Code Printed coasters. Each QR code consists of a unique weblink or microsite that helps engage consumers through – watch the video to know more.
Social Media Campaign [Home Engagements]
With the help of social media, we can launch a sales promotion campaign from the comfort of the Consumer’s home. Pre-assigned restaurant outlets will push banner advertising on their social media posts. While browsing, customers will find this promotion offer on their social media feeds or profiles.
The Consumer clicks the post, and the link takes the Consumer to a dedicated URL to fill in the asked details. And Consumer receives a unique QR code to be shown at the outlet. As soon as the customer visits the respective outlet and shows the code to the bartender, the bartender scans the QR Code. After scanning, the QR will automatically capture the unique offer code. It will pop up on the bartender’s WhatsApp, where he has to tap on the send button, and the customer avails the free drink or discount – Confused, watch this short video to understand better.
Dealer Demand Generation for [Retailers]
Dealer demand generation is an indirect channel to promote sales through your business influencers such as retailers. The retailer gets instant gratification from placing instant orders. Generally, in the Indian retail market, a sales officer visits the dealer to take product orders and simultaneously offers him a reward to push for more orders.
In this technique, the sales officer records the retailer’s order details and his name, number, order quantity on a mobile app. The retailer receives an SMS with OTP on his mobile number. He shares the OTP with the sales officer, and the sales officer will submit the OTP to qualify him for the scheme.
A weblink will be shared on the dealer’s mobile number. It will congratulate and inform the dealer that he has won a reward and ask him to claim it. The retailer receives two types of rewards, either Paytm Cashback or Spin the Wheel contest. Here is a quick tour on how it is done on the field –
Consumer Purchase Channels for [Festive Season]
The prime reason for sales promotion was to engage consumers from the Fast Moving Consumer Durables (FMCD) industry at different touchpoints such as brand dedicated stores, trade partners, modern trade outlets and online platforms. In this campaign, a unique QR Code or IVR number was printed on a tent card and placed near the billing counter. This will allow the Consumer to land on a dedicated landing page, where the Consumer enters their contact details and uploads the product purchase invoice.
The customer receives the Spin the Wheel gamification link to win different digital and physical rewards. If the reward is digital, like cashback, subscriptions, or vouchers, customers instantly redeem on their mobile through instant gratification.
A message will pop up on Consumer’s mobile for the physical reward that you will be contacted within 48 hours. Once the invoice, identity or customer query are resolved, the Consumer receives the physical reward sent through delivery/courier services. Witness the entire process of how each of the platforms consumers are engaged during the festive season –
Planning the Campaign
Here is a detailed sheet where you can find the right type of campaign, point of redemption, budget, and duration for the different stakeholders and best-suited industry.
Downsides of Sales Promotion
Don’t pit yourself against the wall in peer pressure: The timing of the sales promotion should align with your business resources. Your competition is doing something does not mean it would be suitable for your business; waiting for the right time is essential. Consider this scenario – a leading travel case company stays for an entire year for sales promotion for a vacation period to achieve good sales.
Offering rewards can make it complicated to see your products back to their original price point: The timeline of the promotions is very important, as some of the customers may never pay full price for your products. It is recommended to stick to the stringent promotional timelines and allow some gap between promotions to sell your products at their original cost.
Conclusion: How Sproxil can drive your sales promotion
While signing up for sales promotion, the prime motto has to be focused on the type of campaign, budget, duration and industry you operate.
Over the years, we have gained consumer engagement expertise for industries such as Beverage, Pharma, FMCG, Construction and many more.
Looking to build any innovative sales promotion strategies as shown in the videos, we are just a click away – to work well within your budget constraints and high perceived value for your customer.
