Running promotional activities can help with business growth

Promotions can range from very simple to quite complex and can be based on product types, sales channels and other key variables.

While it may seem that selling products for less than their normal price would not be great for business, it is actually a powerful way to help with growth. Offering sales incentives to customers can be a great way to get more people to engage with your business, opening the door to more sales and more word-of-mouth recommendations in the future.

Let's take a look at how running promotional activities can help with business growth.

Comprehensive and creative approach to promotional success

The modern customer is less responsive to non-personalised offers and inconsistent pricing. Your promotional activities should be all about boosting sales and inspiring loyalty, so your pricing strategies need to be creative and tailored to specific customer interactions.

Modern businesses collect valuable data on buyer behaviour and engagement with products. This enables you to improve the customer experience by presenting the right offer at the right time. 

Here are some commonly-used promotions engines that are known to boost customer engagement:

• Cashbacks: the chance to earn cash from the money you spend, by paying you back a percentage of what you spend or giving you reward points.
• Sweepstakes: a contest where a prize or prizes may be awarded to a winner or winners.
• Instant wins: award prizes to consumers instantly upon submission of your campaign.
• Gift with purchase: a marketing technique in which a consumer gets a small product for free after buying a product.

In some cases, you can apply multiple promotions to a single order. For example, providing cashback to consumers but also including a sweepstake where consumers can have a chance to win a prize.

How can promotional activities help grow a business?

Promotions are known as one of the core components of a successful marketing strategy. It is a way of communicating with your target market to raise awareness and engage prospects. You will gain attention and generate interest in your products or services. You will generate demand and encourage people to buy from you.

Here are four ways promotional activities can help with business growth:

• Raise awareness: Your target audience will become more aware of you and what you sell, as long as your promotions are designed to reach them effectively.
• Generate interest: A well-designed content marketing strategy will nurture leads and make you stand out from the competition.
• Nurture demand: Your products/services will become more desirable. Then, once people experience what you can do for them, they will become loyal customers.
• Encourage prospects to take action: In addition to buying your products, new customers may also feel inclined to recommend them to people they know, meaning you win loyalty and new word-of-mouth prospects.

Essentially, running promotions can contribute to the customer buying process. It can also strengthen your relationships with customers and cultivate loyalty that will help you in the long run.

Using the right engine and technology to enhance promotions

A promotions engine must seamlessly integrate with your existing e-commerce infrastructure so that the strategy is consistent across all channels. It must rely on valuable customer data to ensure you create the right offers for the right people.

Machine learning helps guide the decisions of merchandisers when it comes to applying for promotions. Of course, a healthy instinct can be good too, particularly in brick-and-mortar stores, but the data processed by AI can power evidence-based decisions regarding your promotional work.

Moreover, you need to execute your promotions at the right time. They can be scheduled to begin and end on specific dates and customers need to be made aware of these dates. Effective promotions are often based around universal things at certain times of year (Christmas, Easter, spring, etc.) or they could be to celebrate certain milestones for your business.

Just be sure to enhance the effectiveness of your promotions with technology and make informed choices about which promotional engines to use.

Make sophisticated promotions simple

A final thought about your business promotions is that they must not appear too complex to the customer. In order to inspire trust, you need your customers to be able to easily understand how your promotion works.

Even if it is actually a complex combination of deals they are triggering, it needs to be explained to them as simply as possible and the results of the promotions applied need to be clearly defined for them.

Get help with your promotions

For businesses in Australia, there is no better platform for facilitating the right promotions and rewards for clients and customers than iGo. They provide end-to-end promotions solutions that build loyalty and sales and focus on customer behaviour. From concept development to gathering consumer insights, they can do it all.

Get in touch with the promotional experts today.