How to Use Promotions to Drive Back-to-School Sales
As summer winds down, the rush for back-to-school supplies, everything from pencils to pants, is soon to begin. While capturing this season's sales, retailers can also engage their customers with promotions that build brand affinity and give them reasons to return once the back-to-school season has ended.
A smart promotion portfolio is diverse but always balanced with incentive programs that help retailers remove customer anonymity. Three promotional strategies that engage customers and foster long-term relationships are rebates, promotional games and social referrals.
Rebates
We're not talking about your grandmother's rebates here. Today's rebates feature easy online submission, real-time tracking, aggregation across multiple purchases and consumer choice at reward redemption. Retailers benefit from rebates by acquiring high-quality customer data. This information can be leveraged for follow-up, targeted offers.
Rebates can be especially powerful in driving buying behavior. For example, a rebate on a "Back-to-School Package" (pencils, a notebook, ruler, book bag and lunch box) offers a specific incentive based on the purchase of a group of products and drives customers to buy each of the products to qualify for the rebate.
Offering multiple reward payout options can also drive sales. Payout options like gift cards to local restaurants or the ability to donate reward dollars to local schools or charities build a family and school-oriented image for retailers and reinforce community connectivity.
Promotional Games
Everybody likes to win! Promotional games can make the shopping experience more fun while also providing an excellent platform for data collection and follow-up offers.
Games that bring shoppers to an online portal to redeem points, track their status or submit entries can be particularly effective. For example, a back-to-school game based on past purchases and answers to basic trivia questions that reward "winners" with targeted coupons or help them "graduate" to new grade levels could generate increased sales.
Social Referrals
Making it easy for your customers to share their shopping and loyalty activities with their online social networks underscores your commitment to engaging with them and, more importantly, their communities.
Offering easy-to-use interfaces for Facebook and Twitter sharing is a requirement these days, but don't forget good ole email! Simple prompts that allow users to type in email addresses or choose from a list they've synched offer a great medium for your customers to broadcast their purchase or promotional game achievement — and also help retailers access new customers that may not frequent social networks. Standard opt-in protocols allow each customer to define their desire to take part in such marketing campaigns.
Now What?
Now that you've begun collecting better customer data, it's time to marry that demographic data with purchase history data to gain a complete view of each customer. A robust customer relationship management system will enable this analysis, and new technologies make leveraging this data to generate and send follow-up offers a reality. Such targeted offers are extremely relevant and drive incremental purchases and increased customer lifetime value.
With a thoughtful incentive and rewards strategy that focuses on data collection, retailers will not only increase lift during the back-to-school season, but will also have the information required to continue to provide value to each customer throughout the school year.
"It's too late to get things in place for back to school" you say? Well, it's never too late to refine your promotional marketing portfolio. It's imperative that your overall marketing agenda include efforts to leverage the data your customers are already providing you to offer each of them a better shopping experience.
Peter Albers is the executive vice president for digital at Ohana Companies, a provider of an online solution to redeem, validate and fulfill rebates electronically.