The digital shelf is a vast, ever-changing landscape where prices are constantly in flux. When you take into account the dizzying array of products and sellers out there, it’s a miracle that brands can keep track of anything—much less the intricacies of promotional prices that demand strategy, insight and a keen eye for timing.
While it’s true that running a promotion can seem as simple as throwing up a discount, experienced brands know that there’s much more to it than that.
Here are 5 tips to help you run more strategic, more successful promotions:
- Timing is everything – One of the best ways to boost sales is to plan your promotions around trends and events that your customers are invested in. If you’re in the grocery industry, for instance, running a promotion on snack products in the lead-up to a championship sporting event can put more of your products in watch party shopping baskets.
- Generate awareness – Your promotion won’t drive conversions if shoppers don’t even know it exists. By running awareness campaigns that target existing customers, you encourage them to purchase your products and take proven steps toward earning their brand loyalty—as 46% of all US shoppers say that providing the lowest price is the best way for brands to win their loyalty.
- Keep an eye on the competition – A promotion is only good if shoppers see value in comparison to their other options. Understanding your competitors’ pricing strategy can help you pick the right level of discount to overtake the competition without sacrificing your own margins.
- Stay on top of price violators – When a promotional price takes effect, it can be very easy for sellers to take advantage of your promotion window. If a seller starts the promotion earlier than intended, they can undercut the rest of your selling partners and start a race to the bottom with pricing. This can lead to an unintended domino effect of some sellers going even lower than your intended promotion. Furthermore, it can be easy for some sellers to run the promotion longer than intended and reap the rewards of being the only seller around with such a low price. Understanding these pricing vulnerabilities is the first step to addressing them. The second step is to find tools that help you do that automatically—like PriceSprider’s Prowl solution.
- Plan and proactively manage your promotions – Without a clear plan of action when it comes to promotion duration, amount and product, you create opportunities for unscrupulous sellers to take advantage of your brand. This is why the ability to monitor and adjust promotions on your own is extremely important.
All these tips come down to one thing: gaining complete control over your promotions. By controlling the details of your promotions and keeping track of who is violating your guidelines, you can protect your revenue and maintain a consistent price experience. Tools like PriceSpider’s Prowl, armed with MAP monitoring and enforcement features, empower brands to steer promotions with precision, swiftly adjusting to outmaneuver price violators.
The ability to add, edit and delete promotions from a self-service tool without any external intervention is a game changer here–making it easy to adapt on the fly and drive more successful promotional runs, which in turn lead to happier customers.
Whatever your strategy is, the common denominator to a successful promotion is effective management. PriceSpider’s MAP monitoring and enforcement solution does all of this and more. Our proprietary crawling tech goes beyond catching pricing and promotion violators across the digital shelf; it gives you a bird’s-eye view of seller behavior, pricing trends, and much more. Discover how PriceSpider can help your brand by booking a demo today!
