Sales promotions are basically marketing techniques that allow a brand to attract more customers towards a certain product or towards the brand itself. All industries and businesses indulge in providing such promotions as it suits their customer base, and it is largely done to provide customer satisfaction apart from stock clearance.
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Examples of Sales Promotions
Here are 10 examples of sales promotions from history that performed excellently and became defining points in the business’ career.
Discounts and Special Prices
This is perhaps the most common sales promotion technique used by consumer goods-based brands. Holiday based discounts such as Black Friday and Christmas prices are provided by businesses owners to attract customers during the holiday season. These promotions vary geographically and also based on the social contexts of the target market. Even brands that do not require the extra recognition will participate in providing such discounts to ensure customer satisfaction.
Reward Points
Reward point-based promotions use the concept of returning buyers to promote sales. Each time a buyer makes a purchase from the business they receive reward points, and upon receiving a certain amount of points they can be exchanged for discounts. This works the best for ecommerce platforms such as Amazon and Ebay who have returning customers making multiple purchases. By providing reward points such platforms ensure that they don’t lose their customer base to competing platforms.
Contests and Giveaways
Contests can be widely varied and is usually related to how the business operates. For example a brand such as Nike will organize sports based contests and provide free giveaways to participants to promote the brand; and a brand such as Amazon will provide a first come first serve based contest where the first 100 customers on a certain day will receive a free product with their purchase.
Buy one Get One Free
This is the best stock clearance promotion that a brand can run. Clothing brands are the most common in providing such offers since it ensures that customers will surely buy their products. Certain brands even provide buy one get two free or buy two get one free offers as required by their stock clearance needs. These can also be used as holiday-based offers by brands instead of the usual discount option.
Shipping Schemes
Providing free of discounted shipping is once again mostly used by eCommerce platforms. The usual shipping offers are provided if the customer buys goods worth a certain amount. This promotes the customer’s buying decision and pushes them to fulfill the amount criteria by purchasing more products in order to claim the shipping offer. Many brands also provide shipping schemes on their personal ecommerce portals.
Holiday Promotions
Holiday promotions are provided by brands of all sizes to ensure that their holiday stocks are cleared and customers are also satisfied. Holiday based discounts are quite common. Other forms of holiday promotions include free products with purchases or specific discounts of select products. These are mostly meant for consumer product-based brands such as Walmart or Ebay.
Customer Loyalty Programs
Customer loyalty programs are akin to reward points, but mostly based on physical purchases. For example, a restaurant may provide discounts on every third visit of a customer. Such a sales promotion schemes ensures that customers will choose the particular brand over others and become a returning customer to claim their loyalty rewards. It also shows that a brand caters to its loyal customers and builds a strong relationship. Certain businesses also provide buyers clubs where you pay a certain fee to join the club and enjoy exclusive discounts which amount to more than the joining fee.
Free Samples
Providing free samples is a great way to promote a new product or a brand. You will often see such free samples being given in malls and supermarkets to get potential customers acquainted with the product. Nobody says no to a free product and thus a lot of organic promotion can be achieved through this method. Digital media can be tied into this form of promotion whereby consumers who share the brand on their social media receive a free sample from the brand.
Financial Schemes
Financial schemes help consumers make large purchases within their purchasing power. For example, if a customer wants to buy a premium vehicle, they might not be able to do it outrightly due to the cost factor. But if the brand provides a scheme whereby, they are needed to make only half the amount as down payment and the rest in monthly installments, the chances of the car being sold is much higher. Such schemes are also provided by real estate companies in order to ensure that the real estate can be purchased by those who do not own the necessary purchasing power.
Joint Promotions
Joint promotions help brands promote themselves while also piggybacking on another brand’s success. In return the latter brand is also promoted as the joint venture is clearly promoted in such cases. For example, a shoe brand may tie up with a clothing brand whereby if a customer were to buy both these products together, they would receive a discount. In such a case the bigger of the two brands will be able to sell their product at a discounted price while not losing much value and the smaller brand will gain the necessary marketing push since they have tied up with the bigger brand.
Wrap Up Examples of Sales Promotions
Promoting sales is one of the most important tasks that a brand needs to undertake in order to meet the stiff competition of today’s times. It also gives them a marketing purpose since consumers are quite likely to pay attention to adverts that have words such as discounts, giveaways, rewards, etc. in them. And most importantly these schemes, if setup in the right manner provides customer satisfaction and builds customer loyalty which is the most important aspect for a brand to thrive in the long run.
Are you planning to run a sales promotion campaign for your business? Hopefully you will be able to pick the right scheme for your brand after reading through this list!
Image by Gerd Altmann
