How to Create Promotions for Online Retail

Having a promotion for your online store is one of the best ways to drive traffic and increase website sales. Your objective should be to encourage your customers to make a purchase by offering various incentives. Before you start your promotion, set a specific goal that you want to achieve. It could be for X number of products sold or X revenue generated either by the product type or the total orders.  

There are several types of promotions you can try:

• Percentage or amount off the product price
• Percentage or amount off the customer’s total order
• Free shipping
• Free gift
• Buy one, get one
• Get a percentage off your second purchase
  

Next, set the budget you want to spend for the promotion. Evaluate your marketing options – you could advertise in newsletters, in newspapers, in the radio or TV,  in social networks like Facebook or in other online channels.  You might also want to print brochures or coupons for the promo. While you’re thinking about the marketing of your promotion, you should also define your target market.

Finally, start working on your creative. The actual banners or printed materials that you will be sending out to your customers. Here, you need to have the complete information for your promotion. It would be best to have a unique name per promotion so tracking and monitoring success would be easy. Don’t forget to include the limits for the promotion including:

• the number of times it can be used
• the number of times one promo coupon can be applied to an order
• if it can be used in conjunction with other promotions
• if it is limited to a specific product
• how many times it can be applied for an individual shopper
• if it can be used for items already on sale or just for regular priced products
• if there’s a validity date
  

Don’t forget to  inform all concerned staff about on-going promotions to avoid any hassles for the customers.

Happy selling!