How Can Consumer Brands Place Promotions And Customer Loyalty At The Center Of Growth
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Companies often feel that promotions and loyalty aren’t a key focus — that they’re a ‘nice to have’ once their campaigns are running or a way to put out fires if things are trending down. But by including promotions in your strategic planning from the outset, you can develop more creative campaigns — and improve outcomes. In our Promotion Growth Framework, Talon.One has created a guide for how to think about promotions, no matter what stage of growth you are at.
There’s a clear benefit to doing so, and it’s not just Talon.One that thinks so. Some 57% of organizations say implementing key digital technologies is critical to their digital business, according to research from Accenture.
Why is that? Because Deal Nerd found that coupon users spent 46% more at checkout, on average than regular shoppers.
But how do you ensure that those coupons are going to be effective? Nearly 79% of consumers say they’re only likely to use a promotion if it’s tailored to previous interactions, experts Marketo discovered.
Where are you right now?
If you’re starting to make out your promotion strategy, you should keep in mind the kinds of questions posed by the problems you’re facing daily. By identifying the stage of growth you’re in, you can start to put together a promotions plan that suits the use cases you typically see.
The startup phase
- Can we secure enough customers to become viable?
- Can our services compete with our competitors’?
- How can we expand our sales base?
- Does my team have the capacity or expertise to take on more projects?
The growth phase
- Should we start hiring specialists?
- How do I maintain multi-year client relationships?
- How should I be reinvesting profits into my business?
The maturity phase
- How do I free up my team from routine work to focus on growth goals?
- Have I lost touch with my core business?
- How do I keep customer sentiment high?
When you’ve answered those questions, you can start thinking about what promotions and promotion feature you will need to solve them.
Data-driven promotions
It’s quickly becoming accepted across a variety of industries that promotions are a way to improve outcomes. In a CNBC profile of Dick’s Sporting Goods, the US news outlet explains how large retailers are using promotions to ‘crack the code of driving up profits.’
Dick’s Sporting Goods have “phased out circulars, which required the company to guess in advance about what it should put on sale. Now, it can monitor trends and adapt more nimbly with the help of data science — cutting or raising prices in almost real-time.”
For big brands, being data-driven is no longer merely an aspiration; it’s a necessity. It also outlines how the mentality changes as enterprises mature. Companies move from promotion-heavy acquisition campaigns to tailored promotions focused on retention. While it’s not strictly necessary to have tailored and dynamic promotions technology as a bootstrapped startup, keeping promotions front-of-mind as you transition through growth stages can ensure you don’t let your lack of foresight become a barrier to growth.
Promotions for any size
The best mentality when deciding on your promotion needs is to pair it with your promotion goals. Who are the users you want to target, activate or retain? What are their needs?
By using a Customer Engagement platform like MoEngage you can start to profile your user types and look for behavioral trends. When analyzing cohorts, start to identify pain points or drop-off points. If your 7-day retention is poor, perhaps you can offer staggering incentives over the onboarding process, or guide users towards features by giving them tokens or credits for investigating.
Upselling can also be a loyalty factor, you can nudge users towards higher-priced features by giving them benefits for doing so. Uber rewards registered users one point for every dollar spent on POOL & Uber Eats, two points for every dollar invested into UberX, and three points for each dollar spent on their premium service.
At each tier you reach, you’ll unlock features intended to improve the overall experience of using Uber services, like flexible cancellation, priority support, free Uber Eats deliveries, or price protection between favorite destinations.
By gating these attractive features behind loyalty, you can encourage engaged users to convert more frequently and reduce the perceived cost of each individual action.
Your marketing mix needs promotions
How you use promotions can be a difference-maker in highly competitive industries. The modern consumer is no longer happy to be targeted with generic, drab promotions. They’re looking to build authentic relationships with brands — and want to feel rewarded. You can harness this feeling by generating dynamic, tailored campaigns, improving your customer relationships, and driving better results.
For a full explanation of how to include promotions at every stage of growth, read Talon. One’s Promotions Growth Framework
Further reading
