In an increasingly competitive online environment, promotional marketing offers a chance for organisations to stand out from the crowd and actively build relationships with their prospects and customers.
A well-executed promotion builds brand awareness, loyalty and trust — allowing for companies to more easily acquire and retain customers — wouldn’t that be nice?
However, in the pursuit of the benefits of promotional marketing, too many companies become caught up in the abstract strategy and don’t follow through with an holistic approach to the customer experience. For us at Uniqodo, to realise this approach you need to pursue Promotion Experience strategies, not just marketing strategies.
In this article, we’ll be disseminating what promotional marketing is compared to Promotion Experience — we’ll also demonstrate that the latter is the better path to success — so pack your walking boots and get on track to more valuable customer journeys.
The basics:
Promotional Marketing vs. Promotion Experience
Before we start discussing the various benefits of promotional marketing vs. promotion experience, we first need to define our terms.
What is promotional marketing?
At its most basic, promotional marketing is any activity that aims to share an awareness of a particular product, brand, or service (and then make people realise they want to buy it).
Essentially, promotional marketing is the high-level ideal behind promotional activities. It is the set of abstract strategies that brands use to differentiate themselves in a crowded market, attract and retain new customers, and promote their brand and products or services — the ‘Where’s Waldo’ of brand strategy, if you will.
What is Promotion Experience?
If a promotional marketing strategy is the abstract way to promote a product, brand, or service through the use of promotions, then promotion experience is the newer, more intuitive concept that governs how those promotions impact the customer journey.
One of the issues with using promotional marketing on its own is that it often fails in the execution. It’s one thing to say that a certain promotion is a good idea — it’s another entirely to execute the promotion in a way that leaves a lasting positive impression on as many customers as possible.
Promotion Experience takes a more exhaustive, intricate, and granular approach to how and when promotions are used, treating each customer as an individual and targeting them with personalised promotions that they will find authentically useful. Personalisation is a great way to build on the relationships you have with customers, ensuring they feel heard, seen and valued — if they don’t feel like this, then why would they stay with your brand?
Personalisation coupled with a guided customer journey from discovery to basket, exponentially increases the likelihood of redemption. If you receive a promotional treasure map, but then have to wade blindly through a jungle of irrelevant information and roadblocks, you’ll likely turn back, get on your ship and leave to find a new promotional promised land.
At a time when customers are placing much greater emphasis on both personalisation and authenticity, being able to weave both into marketing activities offers businesses tangible benefits.
The Reasons Why Promotion Experience Is Superior
Compared to traditional promotional marketing, Promotion Experience drives better results in four critical areas:
Psst: For each of these areas, we’ve also included some strategies to help with actualising these outcomes. Pro tip: If you partner with a third party Promotion Experience specialist (like us at Uniqodo) we can help you do absolutely everything outlined below.
Improved acquisition:
Instead of the generic approach taken by promotional marketing, the specific personalisation used in Promotion Experience, allows customers to be targeted with promotions that match their needs and behaviours through a range of channels. In other words, you can see clearly what people want, automatically design promotions that suit them and then deliver the promotion they need.
Instead of simply barraging customers with the same volley of undirected advertising they face and tune out of every time they open an app or browser, Promotion Experience is focused on creating a genuine and impactful experience that is particular to a specific target audience. For example, as a company that produces walking sticks, it would be wasted to attribute a large portion of your promotional marketing budget on targeting younger people.
What’s more, by focusing on the experience of prospects and customers, it ensures that journeys from affiliate or third-party promo code sites are streamlined and curated.
Strategies to help:
- Custom landing pages: Instead of generic banner ads, custom landing pages represent the first step to a more curated customer experience that makes your promotions far more impactful. If a site greets you with “Hey there Raj, how’s it going?” rather than “Welcome to our site” — the custom greeting leaves a much more positive and more impactful impression on Raj than the generic version.
- Data capture/waiting list: By offering a tangible benefit in return for signing up to a membership or newsletter, promotion experience platforms increase both conversion and retention.
Amplified conversion:
Taking a more focused approach to the customers online promotion journey and experience allows organisations to make sure that their promotional material comes online at exactly the right moment.
You need to know how to increase conversion through Promotion Experience. This includes… Using data-driven personalisation, companies can identify the specific product or service that their customers value and create targeted promotions to match. They can also use limited-time offers to create a sense of urgency around the promotion and increase sales. This means promos like “Hurry 50% ending in 1 hour” not “hey...if you fancy, we’re offering 20% off until 2031” — because who would be drawn in by the latter?
Strategies to help:
- Criteria-based promotions: Using information collected from visitor search behavior and basket data, an effective promotion experience platform can create targeted promotions that match the needs and behaviors of your customers.
- Onsite activation: The best 3rd party promotion experience platforms integrate seamlessly with your website, allowing for the use of targeted promotions at the point where they will be the most impactful.
Driven engagement:
Customer engagement is a core part of Promotion Experience and is critical to conversion, acquisition, and retention.
With the more granular focus on the customer experience that Promotion Experience provides, businesses can employ new tools, like gamified advertising and promotions triggered by certain actions, to engage with the customer at the most impactful time.
Strategies to help:
- Exclusive/early access: Offering existing customers early access to advertising and promotions emphasises that you value them and being one of your customers has distinct advantages, increasing customer retention.
- Exit intent: Offering specific promotions to customers as they leave your site is an excellent tool for turning potential customers into actual conversions.
Increased retention:
Retaining a customer is always less expensive than attracting a new one, which in turn, offers a greater ROI on promotional activities. However, customers have never had more choice in their online shopping experience, so retention is far harder to accomplish.
That being said, generally, customers are more likely to return to a brand that appears to value them as an individual rather than a statistic or a KPI. Because Promotion Experience focuses on creating the perfect personalised customer journey, it enables companies to demonstrate that they treat each of their customers as an individual and values them, reducing churn over the long term. Keep your customers happy, and they’ll stick around for more. Simple as.
Strategies to help:
- Dynamic error messaging: Customer experience is at the core of promotion experience management, so having instant and dynamic error messaging that flags up incorrect codes to your customer and improvising the customer experiences is vital.
- Existing/lapsed customers: Instead of taking an outdated one size fits all approach to promotions, an effective promotion experience platform allows you to segment your customers and offer them specific and targeted promotional campaigns.
Promotion Experience Takes Promotional Marketing to the Next Level
Promotion experience offers a way for eCommerce businesses to access the full benefits promised by promotional marketing and Uniqodo’s Promotion Experience Platform is the best way to achieve those benefits.
Through our adaptable and easy to deploy Promotion Experience Platform, clients have all the tools they need to improve acquisition, amplify conversion, drive engagement, and increase retention, including all those listed above and more.
Pro tip: Even better… The platform offers a light touch integration with all existing marketing channels, without the need for specialised skills or dev work. Less work, more clients, more sales — what’s not to want?
In order to prevent codes from being spread beyond the target audience, the platform also offers unique codes, ensuring that marketing budgets are protected.
Through our Promotion Experience Platform, businesses can create a unique, personalised, and impactful customer experience that showcases their promotions in the best possible light, drives conversion and maximises ROI.
In order to understand the promotional marketing challenges most brands face today and how the Uniqodo Promotion Experience Platform can help to overcome them, book your discovery call today!
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