Sales Promotions and Flintfox

Over time, customers develop a perception of your brand in their mind and compare it with your competitors. According to Mintel, 70% of buying decisions are made at the point of purchase (POP) or point of sale (POS), where a key differentiator persuades them to buy from one supplier over another. The value carried by a brand may play a role, but it is more likely that a sales promotion was the key to persuasion. 

With the cost of living rising and pressure on businesses to drive profitability, now is the time to invest in an intelligent pricing platform that allows you to execute sales promotions with ease. 

Execution determines success or failure 

To remain competitive, companies need to have an intelligent pricing solution that has the flexibility to manage complicated pricing rules and discount structures along with sales incentives such as rebates. The challenge for many is making the leap from manual systems such as spreadsheets or code modifications to existing systems to get by. But the benefits are obvious. 

To effectively and efficiently manage promotion pricing, you’ll need an intelligent pricing platform that can resolve pricing for promotions and offers with margin visibility for all transactions and all sales channels. To put it simply, you’ll require a centralized and reliable single source of pricing truth, AKA: Flintfox. 

How to make your Sales Promotions effective 

To create an effective sales promotion and maximize its impact, there are a series of steps to follow before implementation. These include:  

• Setting a clear and specific target, alongside any secondary goals. For example, if the primary aim is increasing sales of a new product but you’re also aiming to attract new customers. Targets should be attainable and measurable.
• Based on your goals, select a clear target audience. To do this it may be useful to gather information on your existing customers and their buying behaviors.  
• Plan the execution of your sales promotion. Consider your target audience and whether they are best accessed via email marketing, trade shows, social media, or other means. 
• Offer tangible value with your promotions. When developing your sales promotions, it’s important to make sure the offer will be seen as valuable and worthwhile to the customer. If the customer is not satisfied, this can harm your reputation.  
• Consider the timing of your sales promotion and align with key shopping dates if possible and appropriate to drive uptake of the promotion.  
• Emphasize the limited time period or availability of your sales promotion to create a feeling of urgency, encouraging customers to act or risk missing out. 
• Once you’ve run your sales promotion, ensure you review its successful elements and identify areas for improvement. Then build these learnings into generating more effective promotions in the future.  

How can Flintfox help companies with Sales Promotion?  

Well-targeted and effective Sales Promotions often require lots of complex pricing rules. These can be hard to manage manually through spreadsheets alone. Flintfox’s hyper-speed pricing engine can generate 5,000 prices per second, no matter how complex. As a result, businesses can have total visibility of the margins each price will deliver in real-time, enabling simple, on-the-fly adjustments.  

A great example of using our intelligent pricing platform for promotions is rebate programs. Customer rebates act as a promotional lever encouraging behaviors like loyalty and target attainment within a defined time period. Rebates are used when you don’t want to apply more discounts. The rebate is given later after the purchase. It’s not reflected in the sell price, helping to uphold a brand’s equity without deep price discounting. 

Ensuring rebates are managed with total accuracy can be the difference between profit and loss on a promotion, not to mention the cost of wasted time correcting inaccuracies. Our rebate management software has 100% accuracy as well as instant margin visibility making it easier for you to offer the right discounts to the right customers at the right time.  

Sales Promotion Takeaways  

• Sales promotions are a useful tool for boosting short-term sales and stimulating demand, as well as achieving secondary business goals.  
• An effective sales promotion needs to be strategically planned, targeting the right audience, offering real value, and running at the right time.  
• A good sales promotion champions a positive customer experience, with customer satisfaction acting as a strong indicator of success.  
• Partnering with an ISV like Flintfox can help to maximize profitability by identifying the most impactful promotions and timings for your target audience.  

If you’re keen to understand how Flintfox can power up your pricing strategy, reach out today.