How Promotions Help You Build Connections

Let’s face it, promoting a product or service is not just a creative process: it’s a technical one too. You have to fight with your current tech infrastructure to make sure that your strategy can be properly executed. So if you wish to avoid shouting into the void, you need to excel in both mindsets. To help you we explore what promotions are, how a promotion engine works, what the benefits are, and what features you should be looking for. So, let the promotion tour begin!

For a little teaser on the subject, check out this short video.

What Are Promotions? What Is a Promotion Engine?

Promotion: Promotions encompass a broad range of marketing tactics designed to stimulate customer interest and increase sales. This group term includes special deals, discounts, promo offers, cross-promotions, and “buy one get one free” arrangements, among others. These incentives aim to encourage immediate purchases, introduce new products, and enhance customer engagement by providing added value or reducing costs. Ultimately, promotions are strategic tools used to influence consumer behavior and drive revenue.

Promotion Engine: A promotion engine, in turn, is the technological infrastructure that empowers brands to create, manage, and deploy these promotion campaigns efficiently. It serves as a central system for designing specific offers, setting rules and conditions for their activation, and tracking their performance. By automating and streamlining the promotion process, a promotion engine enables businesses to deliver targeted incentives to the right audience, at the right time, and across multiple channels, maximizing the impact of their marketing efforts.

Who Would Benefit the Most From Running Promotions?

Focusing on promotion campaigns is recommended if a brand wants to:

• Struggle to influence customer behavior.
• Have difficulty converting products into sales.
• Want to build a calendar with a different promotion for every week.
• Need seasonal or stock-based promotions.
• Attract first-time buyers, but don’t want to go over budget.
• Want to launch cross-promotions with your partners.
• Have millions of buyers you want to send promotions, fast.

Why Do Promotions Matter:

• Promotions can increase revenue per transaction by up to 30% and related profits by 20%.
• 84% of consumers say promotions influence their buying decisions, directly impacting conversion.
• Targeted promotions can achieve a 30% conversion rates from guests to loyalty members, boosting product sales.
• Bundling promotions can drive up to 25% more sales on specific hero SKUs.

The 10 Promotion Types Every Marketer and Promotion Manager Should Know About

The 10 most common, most recognizable and best-performing promotion types are: 

1. Promotional pricing: A telecom company offers 50% off the first 3 months of a mobile plan to attract new customers.
2. Bonus products: A skincare brand gives away a free travel-sized moisturizer with every purchase of a full-size serum.
3. Free sample: A coffee shop hands out free espresso samples to customers to promote its new dark roast blend.
4. Buy X products to get 1 free: A pet supply store runs a “buy 10 cans of dog food, get 1 free” promotion to increase repeat visits.
5. Buy X products for Y amount of money: A fast fashion retailer allows customers to buy 3 T-shirts for $30 as part of a seasonal sale.
6. Bundles: A hardware store sells a power drill, drill bits, and a toolbox as a discounted bundle to DIY customers.
7. Product sets: A beauty brand offers a curated “summer essentials” set including sunscreen, lip balm, and after-sun lotion.
8. Cross-selling: A tech retailer suggests a discounted mouse and laptop bag when a customer adds a new laptop to their cart.
9. Price reduction: A furniture company slashes the price of dining sets by 25% during a Black Friday sale.
10. Promo codes: An online learning platform offers a “SPRING25” promo code for 25% off any course purchased in April.

Introducing Antavo’s Promotion Engine – The Next Era in Running Promotions

Antavo’s Promotion Engine was designed to help brands engage both loyalty members and non-members, this new engine empowers marketers and developers alike to build compelling promotions that drive conversion and retention.

Antavo previously offered promotion features through its Offers Module, which focused on loyalty member promotions. The new Promotion Engine builds on that foundation to enable promotion management for all shoppers, regardless of their loyalty status.

Key features of Antavo’s Promotion Engine

• Lightning-fast speed: The Promotion Engine also stands out for its real-time processing, boasting a performance of over 100,000 requests per minute and an average response time of 60 milliseconds.
• API-first, headless infrastructure: The robust and scalable API-first technology allows the Promotion Engine to flexibly stack parallel-running promotions and enable seamless integration into any tech stack, including POS systems, eCommerce platforms, pricing engines, and more. 
• Customization: The Promotion Engine offers extensive customization, allowing users to tailor all 10 promotion types. This includes specifying store activation and determining which offers can be combined.
• Promotion stacking & rules: The Promotion Engine enables businesses to implement smart stacking and exclusion rules for promotions. This helps in preventing combinations that might negatively impact profitability.
• Promotion calculator: To ensure your promotion rules work as intended, you can utilize a calculator function to simulate purchases and verify offer stacking. This allows you to test and confirm that all promotions are applied correctly.

With the Promotion Engine, we aim to revolutionize how businesses engage with customers both first-time, and loyal ones. Looking ahead, we’re excited to expand its capabilities with more promotion types and even greater customization options, ensuring the Promotion Engine remains at the forefront of customer engagement strategies.

Andras Taraszovics

Head of Product at Antavo

Conclusion

Promotions are undoubtedly a powerful tool for influencing consumer behavior. However, marketers require the right tools to offer tantalizing promotions—chiefly, a Promotion Engine. Luckily, with Antavo’s advanced Promotion Engine, businesses can effectively manage and deploy a wide range of promotion types with speed, customization, and precision.

If you want to see the Promotion Engine in action, our experts are more than happy to show you a product demo. 

Also, don’t forget to check out our promo video about the Promotion Engine.

Tamas Oszi

Tamas is the Head of Content at Antavo and a Certified Loyalty Marketing Professional – CLMP. Tamas is known for having a keen eye for loyalty and customer retention strategies and trends. Tamas is also a true gamer at heart and has an impressive collection of cyberpunk books.