Promotions – a holiday gift for shopper and retailer

Mark A. Carlson 2 months ago

Promotions are an essential part of any retailer’s marketing toolkit, and never more so than during the holiday season. They increase sales, build loyalty, and delight customers. They also deliver rapid results, complementing longer term brand building strategies.

iVend helps retailers get the most from holiday promotions

Learn more about our integrated retail technology platform.

The holiday season is when promotions do their best work. Shopping activity is up, and consumers are buying goods they wouldn’t normally purchase during the rest of the year. They’re very open to buying from new places – research from Google in Australia, for example, found that at Christmas, a massive 79%* of shoppers are open to buying from retailers that are new to them. This gives retailers the opportunity to win new customers over the gift-giving season and then convert them to becoming repeat shoppers.

In 2022, offers and discounts are more important than ever, as shoppers balance the desire to give gifts with the squeeze on their budgets from cost of living increases. Offering a discount not only wins over new shoppers, but increases the loyalty of existing ones as they see the retailer ‘give something back’.

There is no doubt about the popularity of promotions with shoppers. Statista tells us that 88%+ of shoppers use vouchers and discount codes, and 68% of shoppers say that promotions increase their loyalty§§.

In fact promotions literally have a ‘feel-good factor’, with a study showing that recipients of a voucher had a 38%++ increase in their oxytocin levels!

Shoppers particularly want tailored offers that are targeted, based on their needs, wants and likes. Offers that they feel are not just for ‘people like them’ but actually for them.

The great news for retailers is that if they can get this right, promotions can drive massive business benefits that go way beyond revenue:

Five steps to perfect promotions

The most effective way to implement a promotions program that delivers sales, loyalty and all the follow on benefits, is to harness the power of an integrated retail technology platform.

An integrated retail technology platform is a system that includes all the key elements you need to run your retail business, fully integrated with each other. All the elements work seamlessly together to help retailers plan, deliver and track their promotions.

The key elements of an integrated retail technology platform work together to help retailers through each of the five steps of a promotion campaign: