Retail promotional strategy

Retail promotion strategy:

With the economy still not at peak performance, apparel retailers went to the old standby this past holiday season, discounting.  We all know that this promotions strategy just erodes margins and adds little value to the customer, especially loyal ones.  For the online channel, free shipping (the oldest promotion used in e-commerce) was still at the top of the heap this past holiday season.

Customers have come to expect free shipping, especially for orders of significant value (over $100).  If you’re like many retailers, you’d like to stop this practice of giving customers free shipping all together. Free shipping decreases margins and, in many cases, it can’t be used alongside other more attractive promotions for both the retailer and the customer. Avoid offering free shipping as a site wide promotion; it limits your options due to double-dipping on promotions that will ultimately shave your margins.

Moving forward, retailers must implement a comprehensive promotions strategy to maintain a high level of consumer satisfaction toward their brand. Savvy retailers know their promotions strategies must be innovative, creative and customized to meet the shopping habits of specific consumer segments.  When building a comprehensive Omni channel promotions strategy, it is important to create offers targeted at acquiring new customers, increasing average order size, moving excess inventory, and satisfying customers. Without a well-thought-out strategy, and the systems to deliver and measure success, it is impossible to know whether or not the promotions are generating true return on investment.

Five Actions for Successful Retail Promotions

Using today’s available tools and technology such as e-commerce platforms, mobile devices, and order management systems, omni channel retailers can create customized promotions plans that deliver offers to consumers based on the segmentation of their preferences and shopping behavior.  To execute a winning promotions strategy, retailers should follow these five essential actions:

1. Segment your customers.

Segment customers into groups, particularly if your products attract a diverse group of shoppers. By collecting customer data, merchandisers can better understand the triggers that make a consumer react to a specific type of promotion. Tracking consumers by these behavior groups allows retailers to introduce specialized promotional programs and communicate to consumers with relevant offers. Online capabilities facilitate the collection of information provided by consumers when they register on a site and by their shopping habits. Consumers can then be grouped by price sensitivity, product class, order size, number of visits and other relevant characteristics.

2. Try new types of promotions.

The goal of promotions is to cut through the noise created by the market, and ultimately inspire a consumer to make purchase through a designated call to action. For this reason, promotions must be creative, offer real value, and go beyond discounting.  New promotional concepts – such as shipping destination, shipping methods, x first customers, every nth customer, every x order, items per promotion, apply offer to nth item, returns-based, payment method, free product choice, rebates, multiple bonus products and many others – are starting to be used by some innovative apparel retailers on their e-commerce sites.  Retailers are even starting to use stock-level based promotions to move excess inventory. Although there is a lot of diversity in online promotions, a word to the wise — be sure to have rules in place for managing promotions to avoid pitfalls, such as giving away double offers or unintentionally not providing a consumer with the best available promotion.

3. Test and track promotions.

Once customers are organized into relevant groups and the lists of promotions have been created, retailers can better determine the effectiveness of specific promotions by performing A/B tests. A/B tests are a comparative form of testing that allows merchants to test several promotion types against a typical offer to determine which option will yield the best results. For example, different promotions can be offered to a single group of consumers to find out which promotion is most effective. This can be as simple as offering a 20 percent discount versus a 30 percent discount to determine discount thresholds or as complex as offering 10 unique promotion types. Since this form testing delivers real-time results, A/B is the best vehicle for gathering data on time-sensitive offers. Testing is also an import measurement tool for safeguarding against over promotion and protecting margins.

4. Synchronize omnichannel promotions through the order management system (OMS).

Over the years, consumers have been trained that they can shop through any channel, and thereby get the same promotions no matter where they shop. Synchronizing promotions across channels has been a significant issue for retailers especially between the website and store.  Order management systems that offer a diverse set of promotions can provide the unification of offers across channels.  Unfortunately, too many e-commerce platforms and order management systems do not offer the same promotion types therefore creating a disconnect and weakening creative offer-based strategies.  Review your systems to make sure these software tools offer a diverse set of promotions to maximize your ROI.

5. Go beyond Discounting to Connect with Customers.

Deep discounting across the board used to be the norm in the apparel industry. However, retailers are getting hip to the fact that offering deep discounts to all customers is serving only to lower margins and cheapen the value of the products among many customers who would probably have purchased anyway. Armed with more precise promotions technology to track effectiveness, today’s retailing strategies are moving towards loyalty-based promotions, such as a “surprise and delight” giveaway. Time has shown that customers appreciate receiving something for free, especially when they are not expecting it. Using these promotions create repeat customers. Little things can go a long way, such as sending the customer a thank-you message after the purchase has been made, and then send out a loyal customer offer for their next purchase to seal the deal.