5 Essential Elements to a Back-End Retail Promotion Strategy

Alex Olson
3/31/21 5:01 PM

You say you're committed to enhancing the customer experience. You know that improving the customer experience correlates to more customers in the door, more time spent in the store, and more purchases at your store. A survey revealed nearly three-fourths of companies with an above-average customer experience performed better financially than their competitors.

In the omnichannel era, customers have unlimited choices of where to make their purchases, and you know that to both enhance the customer experience and stay competitive with all of the omnichannel options, you have to offer strategic promotions to your customers.

Too often, the world's most integral companies use multiple manual processes and legacy systems that don't connect and communicate with each other. When this happens, companies have to increase their departments' size to keep initiatives moving in the right direction. A strategic end-to-end promotion strategy on the back end is critical to ensuring that your promotional efforts reach all the channels and are present in the marketplace. By deciding to roadmap and invest in a modern, updated promotion strategy, you can cut expenses and increase sales.

End to End Promotion

At Kingland, we've seen clients successfully execute a back-end promotion strategy using these five essential elements:

Foundation: Keep errors from occurring down the promotion chain. You have numerous vendors, product offerings, and communication among vendors and category managers to track.

Planning: Category managers need to coordinate promotions to increase sales. A common calendar of your promotion schedule across all channels improves the probability of a successful strategy.

Insights: Identify relevant feedback to share with senior levels of the organization. Historical data and trusted forecasting tools provide accurate insights on promotion performance.

Category planning/optimization: Intuitive and comprehensive dashboards allow category managers to make informed decisions based on a promotion's performance. Confidently analyze and optimize the promotion contracts in the future.

Promotion Execution: Ensure customers get the promotions they expect, and stores generate more sales revenue. Execute negotiated promotions to the stores and channels.

Without successfully integrating the five layers above, you expose yourself to risk. It may be a risk of many work hours spent negotiating and planning a promotion that ends up unfulfilled at the store. Perhaps your product and item data fail to match up with the negotiated promotion. Or maybe, you're missing out on promotions due to the manual back and forth of email negotiations. The hard truth is that you risk missing out on the promise of successful customer experience opportunities with the risks mentioned above.

Customers expect to see great deals when they walk your aisles. Even more so, they expect to find what they want and for the deals to ring up correctly at the register.

Want to influence brand loyalties with your customers? Start with the collaboration among your many vendors to execute your promotional efforts seamlessly. And if your customer experience is superior, you could ring in 5.7 times more revenue than your competitors. By focusing your software investment into an end-to-end promotion strategy, you can ensure your customer experience is beyond reproach. Ready for a proven method to improving the customer experience?

Give us a call. We know where to help and where to start because we've done it before. I'd love to set up a time to talk!

You May Also Like

These Stories on Retail

No Comments Yet

Let us know what you think

TRUSTe