3 Top Tips for Promotional Campaign Success
UK retail continues to fight hard on several fronts, including the inexorable rise of e-commerce brands and uncertainty around Brexit. There’s no sign this will change soon.
In this climate, it’s good to know that there are still strategies your brand can follow to deliver good results. Promotions are one such route. But with vast and diverse consumer audiences to consider, how can you make sure your promotional campaign is a success?
Tip 1. Know your audience
Fortunately, there is a wealth of data available to help with the crucial task of audience targeting. Successful modern promotions rely on the insight that can be driven from all of this information, be it held internally on your brand’s own customer database or captured through direct response promotions and marketing campaigns.
When planning retail promotions, it’s key to find a partner with deep knowledge and wide experience. Such a supplier will be able to help you identify the right consumers to speak to in order to maximise the value of your campaigns, as well as helping plan and implement the most valuable type of promotion for your brand.
Tip 2. Consider the channel
Audience understanding is also key to recognising which channels certain types of consumers want to use to interact with and redeem promotions.
For example, latest statistics from new industry measurement body Jicmail and the Direct Marketing Association suggest – perhaps surprisingly – that direct mail is enjoying a resurgence among younger people. Moreover, according to Royal Mail, using mail and digital together can boost engagement and response by up to 62% – well worth considering when targeting ‘digital natives’. It’s this type of insight that can prevent your brand ignoring an important way of reaching your audience.
We recently surveyed just over 1,000 UK consumers to discover their attitudes and behaviours around promotions. This has given us in-depth and fascinating insight that can help drive campaigns for our clients.
For example, 25- to 34-year-olds are the key target market for promotional campaigns: this group showed the biggest gap between responding “yes” (77%) and “no” (13%) when asked the question, “Do rewards and promotions make a brand more attractive while shopping?”
Furthermore, when asked to disclose their preferred method of redeeming promotions, 46% of overall consumers picked a computer; 36% an app; 35% a tablet or smartphone (web); and just 16% SMS. However, 16- to 24-year-olds gave a higher percentage to apps, mobile devices and SMS, but dragged down the total for desktop or laptop computers.
Tip 3. Make your promotions pay
These types of audience variation are important to understand. As new payment methods come onto the market all the time, younger consumers, in particular, are going to want to dispense with receiving cashback via cheque in favour of digital alternatives.
As a long-standing promotional handling company with more than 60 years’ experience in fulfilling promotional campaigns, we have seen first-hand how customers interact with promotions. Customers contribute to the conversation and help you prioritise the right channels for engagement and redemption when you are planning your promotional marketing campaign. Just remember to talk to us sooner rather than later in the planning process to benefit from shared knowledge!
As the retail sector targets increased footfall, brands can future-proof their audience engagement, customer acquisition and loyalty by investing marketing budget and expertise into engaging promotions.