In the current increasingly challenging and competitive environment, courtesy of the ongoing pandemic, retailers are relying heavily on promotions and offers to pull customers back to their stores and generate higher returns. Though promotions are powerful tools for enhancing sales, but too often, poor execution delivers poor results. Inaccurate promotional forecasting can result in stock out and lost sales or costly spoilage and markdown losses. For many retail businesses, accurate promotion planning and effective execution still remain a challenge. Focusing on improvements to their retail promotion planning can help retailers avoid these pain points and drive a 20% improvement in operating margins.

1: Cross-functional collaboration and rich data drives accurate, automated retail promotion execution

Most retail software solutions don’t accommodate promotion planning, leaving marketers and supply chain planners struggling to incorporate spreadsheet-based guesstimates into their forecasts, relying on a combination of past experience and supplier projections to plan promotions and calculate the predicted promotional sales uplift. Without a centralized system, individual stores are forced to place orders manually in order to meet the demand for promoted products while distribution centres (DC) must estimate inventory and purchasing requirements. Too often, all of this happens in silos, with no shared data or plans.

The ETP Omni-channel Retail Promotion Planning solution – ETP Accelerator, along with ETP’s in-POS Omni-channel CRM solution breaks down these barriers. Customer registration details and buying history accrued in the ETP Omni-channel Retail CRM serve as input to the ETP Omni-channel Promotion Planning tool, enabling marketers to easily define business rules and roll out promotions specific to customer segments, making their relationship with the brands a personalized experience. These promotions can be executed based on customer demographics, age, gender, birth dates, and many more such parameters as well as be defined for a specific range of merchandise or time frame or for a specific channel or store. 

The retail marketing team can now plan, execute, and monitor a wide range of promotion campaigns, and deploy them quickly across various channels, both online and offline, using an easy-to-use interface while the supply chain team stays in sync to plan the right level of stock, at the right locations, at the right time. It is important to be able to run a large volume business and yet be able to make your customers feel special every time they interact with you

ETP Accelerator also offers the ability for external applications to leverage ETP’s powerful promotions engine as a service feature which is built on Microservices architecture. Any external application can pass order information to ETP Accelerator and in response, ETP Accelerator will apply the applicable discounts and send back the updated order. The monitoring and management of this data exchange can be controlled by the ETP Connect application.

“Get closer than ever to your customers.
So close, in fact, that you tell them what they
need well before they realize it themselves”
– Steve Jobs

2: Accurate retail promotion forecasts help effectively automate store replenishment

An accurate day-product-store level promotional forecast develops a higher degree of certainty around the amount of inventory a retailer is likely to sell. It also enables accurate and automated store replenishment, which is of particular importance during promotional periods. At just a click of the button, the promotions get enabled immediately at all desired locations and channels. 

Retailers can develop templates for different types of stores and promotions to fit their business characteristics and goals. These templates are used to quickly implement configurations that automatically calculate initial store orders and subsequent replenishment orders. With consistent access to high-quality data, modern supply chain solutions can improve promotional forecast accuracy by 15%, improving store replenishment and inventory optimization throughout the supply chain.

3: Reach your customers online and boost brand loyalty

Promotions in ETP Accelerator can be deployed across social media platforms instantly as campaigns. Retailers can connect with their target market through social media such as Facebook or Twitter to promote the brands. Becoming a part of the social media network helps an organization to capture a large audience and establish direct contact with end-users of the product as well. Posting promotions on social media is a marketing tool to reach your customers online and reignite brand passion and customer loyalty with little upfront cost, which encourages business. The big advantage of having ETP Accelerator as a tool for publishing promotions on social media is that the consistency of the message across stores, eCommerce, and social media is maintained, leading to a holistic customer experience with your brand.

4: Measure and monitor promotion campaign KPIs for retail success

ETP Accelerator is equipped with an intuitive dashboard that enables retailers to stay tuned to the customer expectations and modify their retail marketing promotions as well as easily reactivate previously successful promotions. Retailers can view their various marketing promotions across various periods in a daily, weekly and monthly calendar format using the in-built promotions

planning calendar allowing them to further sync their promotions with the brand’s social media network. A set of business rules monitor the performance of the promotion and measure it against a set of goals, giving you a feedback of how your promotion is performing against your target. This drives the discipline in your business as well as delights customers with a unified brand experience that encourages loyalty.