Sales promotions are a great way for any organization to incentivize & reward potential customers and motivate them to make the purchase. The key to a successful promotion campaign is the plan – right from the launch of the campaign until the very end of it.
Once you have an idea for the campaign, you need to work on the following points to make it successfully work for your brand:
1. Incentivization – Changing perceived value of the product.
Incentives are keys for a successful sales promotion as it increases customer participation & stimulates brand interaction. While choosing incentives, you should always think of your actual target audience. They need to be relevant. For instance, cartoon toys for the kids or movie vouchers for youngsters. incentives appeal to your target audience, that your brand is providing a value add along with the purchase. These incentives helps you sell more & gets your customers engaged with your brand for a longer time.
2. Communication – Online & Offline
Today, your customers have become more technology, online & offline media friendly, compared to how they were until few years back. Hence, they can be reached by social media or through internet on their smartphones. Combining the offline & online media is an effective & swift way to reach the target audience.
3. Collect, Manage & Nurture Data
Data collected can help in customer acquisition & retention. While maintaining the database, unusable data must eliminated from time to time to avoid disorder & confusion. To extract a long term loyalty from your customers, you need to make them realise their importance in your organisation, which can be done through the data collected.
4. Be Relevant
Sales promotion must be relevant to the product & target audience, easy to understand. This increases the probability of it resulting into a sale. It is necessary that the promotion hits customer at a particular behaviour stage.
5. Customize and Localize – attitude & behaviour of the target audience.
The sales promotions must suit the psychographics & demographics of the target audience, well adjusted to their requirements & conduct.
6. Clarify objective & provide tangible benefit – gain the customer’s trust.
The campaign should be able to clearly convince the customer that value received is much higher than the amount spent on the purchase. Be truthful about the objectives to foster a trustworthy relationship. Lay the foundation or a long term loyalty by offering substantial benefits & clarified objectives. The customers like to measure the added value they receive along with the purchase.
7. Timing, duration & frequency – maintain them.
If introduced at an appropriate time, sales promotions can yield great results. Being a time driven economy, in India festivals, occasions & seasons are great influencers for customers. If repeated too often, customers will be unable to differentiate between the added value and the original product.
8. Engage your customer – involve them.
The customers wnats to feel special & appreciated; recognize this need & nurture it to witness groundbreaking results. Engage them with the brand and induce a sense of association & bonding with the product. Appeal them with contests, sweepstakes, coupons & rewards.
9. Integrate with the promotional mix
Sales promotion is an aspect of the promotional mix including advertising, personal selling, direct marketing & public relations. Intensify the efficiency of sales promotions by complimenting it with the other elements of promotional mix.
10. Integrate with social media
Promotions must be run on social media such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram & others. This generates sufficient word of mouth to increase effectiveness of the campaign.
