How to Measure the Effectiveness of Your Sales Promotions

Buy one get one free! These promotions might be easy to create, but how do you ensure they are working?

Sales promotions are one of the most effective marketing tools out there. Any business can benefit from adopting promotional techniques such as coupons, sampling, temporary price reductions, print media, targeted items for targeted people, features, and more. While these techniques can attract people and increase your business' engagement rate, some of these promotions might not be as profitable or effective as you think.

Thus, measuring the effectiveness of your promotions is essential to understand what is and isn't working. Sales promotion effectiveness helps companies fully understand how their promotions and customers work and when done correctly. It helps to make sense of every piece of data, analyze and strategize your next steps better, and establish better communication methods.

Here are some ways of evaluating and measuring the effectiveness of your sales promotions:

1. Measure and analyze promo campaigns 

   1. Once your campaigns are up and running, you need to set them properly to see how they perform. Organize and analyze your data from all the different channels used, sales volume, cost of promos, profits, and ROI in depth. Spreadsheets can come in handy to correctly record your findings. Some of the formulas you can use to calculate your sales' effectiveness can be:

      1. Actual Sales - Baseline Sales = Sales Lift

      2. Total Volume - Base Volume = Incremental Volume.

2. Compare past and current promos

   1. Looking at past promos can help you analyze future ones and even the success factors and mistakes. Past data can serve as a comparison factor and a great way of identifying the best data source. In addition, comparing the results can show you the best trends and which ones need a whole revamp to become more effective.

3. KPIs and ROIs

   1. According to Business Review, "The next step is determining the primary metrics for measuring trade promotion effectiveness. Metrics like sales volume, profits, sales lift, halo, pull-forward, cannibalization, and ROI need tracking. No single metric can give a clear idea of the performance of a promotion, and businesses must use a combination of KPIs." Tracking the right metrics can identify what is effective and analyze customer satisfaction, engagement, and loyalty value of customers.

4. Track competitor & consumer behaviors

   1. Tracking and predicting competitor and client behavior can help you plan great promo. Knowing your competitors and how they run their promotions can help you counter-promote something better without having a potential loss. This can help you determine what units you might need in stock. Some brands even have a promotional and markdown calendar done over six months in advance. Aside from competitors, track what your customers are like and what they like. What type of promotion is your data showing proven successful to them? Evaluating the effectiveness of your business' sales promotions on your own can be overwhelming and laborious. The best thing to do is learn how to track and implement the most effective sales strategies through AI tools and the expertise of a sales and analytics advisor. Data management and AI tools can help your business succeed in your promotional campaigns and garner the most profit.

Marketing analytics helps us see how everything plays off of each other to decide how your company may want to invest moving forward. Re-prioritizing how your team spends its time, and the resources, channels, and efforts you invest in, are critical steps to achieving marketing success and improving sales. At DuartePino, our analytics experts analyze your business’ data to evaluate the performance of your marketing, content, and products and use your analytics insights to reach the right people. Contact us to learn what our trust advisors can do for you.