Marketing: How To Plan A Successful Sales Promotion?

Let that person cast the first stone who never anxiously waited for the famous Black Friday to arrive to buy some item on sale. Or those weeks right after Christmas, the time of year when most stores offer discounts on almost all products.

The fact is that sales promotion is a beneficial strategy for many different goals and niches. In addition, it works very simply, generates attraction for new audiences, and promotes a more significant number of sales.

Why Do Sales Promotion?

Sales promotions are strategies companies create with many different goals, including increasing sales (and revenue, as a result), attracting new audiences, retaining more customers, and moving inventory.  

We are used to hearing about the big and famous retailers’ discounts or the unique promotions of fast fashion stores. The feeling is that only brands that sell furniture, beauty products, or clothing can create sales promotions.

This thinking is wrong. When planned according to the objectives they intend to achieve, these initiatives can be created for any market sector and companies, from industries such as food to distributors. 

How To Do Sales Promotion

To be successful in sales promotion and receive the expected return, you need to implement step by step and follow it to the letter. Check out an example below that can be used as a guide: 

1 – Define The Objective And Choose The Appropriate Promotion Format

What do you expect the company to gain from the sales promotion? Become more known? Win more customers? Improve the relationship? Move stock? For example, a food industry that produces Panettone. Christmas is just a few days away, and the store is still entire. For example, it is possible to apply a progressive discount percentage on purchasing one or more items. 

Or do you want to leverage the distribution reach of the launch of a new headset model? You can invest in digital marketing to let more people know and offer a percentage discount to the first ten buyers.

2 – Define The Rules Of Participation

This is a crucial step and should be thought through carefully. The rules must be easy to follow and understand. People tend to abandon complex or difficult-to-understand processes, and engagement drops considerably. 

Let’s go back to Panettone. In this case, it is necessary to clarify the discount percentage for each item purchased – 5% on the first item, 10% on the second item, and 15% on the third – in addition to explaining which flavors the sales promotion is valid for.  

3 – Set A Minimum Deadline For Completion

A good sales promotion causes a feeling of euphoria in the audience, making them access e-commerce or go to the company store to participate. But what if the promotion lasts all year? 

The euphoria ends because there is not enough creative marketing to keep the company’s strategy visible for that long. That is, establish a beginning and an end for your sales promotion, and if there are other needs shortly, plan new events with different goals.

4 – Bet On Disclosure!

The more extensive and creative the promotion, the more accessible for people to get to know and join the sales promotion. And this strategy doesn’t always have to be expensive. If your company creates an advertisement to increase revenue, there is certainly no budget left to spend on billboards or television commercials. But outreach emails and social media posts are cheap and efficient strategies.

Examples Of Sales Promotion

Many types of sales promotions can be put into action. As we said, it all depends on what the company wants with this strategy. Check out some examples:

• Gifts: Offering gifts whenever a customer makes a purchase is an excellent way to encourage this consumption and strengthen the relationship with the company. In this case, it is still possible to request the customer’s information to register them in the company’s database and use this for future marketing.
• Birthday discount: Remember the information collected from customers? You can use this data, such as date of birth, for example, to offer exclusive deals that strengthen the relationship and generate new sales.
• Progressive discount: These are pretty common. When you buy one item, get the second one free. Or 10% off the first item, 15% off the second, and so on. This type of sales promotion is widely used by companies that not only need to increase revenue but also want to move inventory.

The Dangers Of A Poorly Executed Sales Promotion

As we said in the introduction of this post, not everything is so easy in elaborating sales promotions. Let’s go back to the headphones example. What if the hype wasn’t restricted to the first ten shoppers and everyone who came in contact with the store demanded the discount? 

First, the company might have a specific loss if the discount was significant. Second, the stock would probably run out, and customers would be frustrated.

Before any decision, it is necessary to plan a lot so that everything goes as expected and the company does not end up receiving negative comments on the internet or even losing customers.

Also Read: Less Advertising: Eight Tips Against Annoying Advertising