The online marketing mix is a noisy one. With so much information and increasingly personalised offers, getting your brand noticed by consumers can be a huge challenge. The fact is, customer loyalty can quickly fade when competitive offers are just a click away.

Paid ads, email newsletters, social campaigns and SEO are all tactics that are typically deployed to build awareness and generate traffic, but there is more that can be done to make marketing more effective. The fact is, retailers are investing in getting the right kinds of traffic, but are not moving customers down the purchase path. By focusing on engagement at critical points in the purchase path you can get the cut through you need, activating potential customers to continue on their journey right through to conversion.

Why engagement?

Attracting and retaining customers requires more than sheer advertisement. Engaging promotions and targeted campaigns typically speak directly to your customers and can lead to significant increases in conversion rates.

There are two key ways in which online promotions can drive more sales. Firstly, they drive the purchase intent of your customers, giving them a reason to continue to engage with your store and make repeat purchases. Someone who has bought from you before will do so again - they just need an incentive.

And secondly, promotions drive unknown users to opt-in to your marketing communications, allowing you to build an interested and readily convertible database.

Prize draws, digital coupons, giveaways and contests are all great ways to start driving engagement, and give your customers additional motivation to buy from you. This means better conversion rates, better return on marketing investment and more sales.

In fact, retailers are reporting notable results from successful online promotions, for example: incremental sales with a ROI of up to 1400%, adding thousands of new contacts to marketing lists, getting customers to spend several minutes, instead of seconds, exploring their site.

Great, but how?

The premise of an engaging promotion is simple – instead of presenting the product information and its price to the potential customer, you invite them to interact with your selling process and reward them for participation. It’s a matter of basic human behaviour. We want to be entertained, we are curious and we don’t want to miss out, and that’s why fun and interesting promotions have high appeal.

Those interactions could include signing up to your marketing register, downloading a voucher, completing a survey or taking part in a contest. The rewards can be equally diverse too: gift cards, discounts, exclusive content or even free products can all be used to incentive that all important purchase.

Contests are typically the most popular promotion type. For the consumer, they offer a great mix of entertainment and excitement. For the marketer, the engagement they receive can generate thousands of new opt-ins for the marketing list and provide a great approach for showcasing new products and linking them with relevant topics.

Tailoring these to suit different channels is important, however. For example, if you plan to run your contest on Facebook, use more entertaining content to encourage social sharing and conversation. In contrast, if your contest is primarily promoted on your own website and through email newsletters, focus these on driving participants more directly to purchase.

Another simple promotion is the digital coupon, but it’s proven to be highly popular with consumers. Coupons are a personal and effective mechanism for driving engagement, which is often compounded when the offer is highly targeted or time limited. Digital coupons are one of the most powerful tools to secure the purchase decision and often see a redemption rate up to 10 times greater than that of their paper counterparts.

There are many other promotion types that are also available too, all with a proven ability to drive engagement, such as surveys, viral coupons and location-based promotions. Mix and match your approach to find the promotions that achieve the best results with your target groups and business goals.

Where’s the catch?

To be successful, any promotion needs to hit the right balance between what a participant wants and what a participant gets. We call this the value exchange and an effective promotion will match the effort required with the reward on offer.

Consumers are busy and lazy, and it’s your job as a marketer to make it simple, easy and inviting to participate in your promotion. Ensure there is a low barrier to participation and that you offer clear terms and rewards for that engagement.

For example, demanding an abundance of personal information in exchange for being put on the mailing list for a monthly newsletter is not a particularly appealing promotion. But turn the promotion into a lucky draw that requires participants to fill in just a couple of fields, offering an appealing prize, and you are much more likely to pique interest – and secure engagement.

The three step process to engagement Nirvana

Set your goal

Setting a clear goal or objective is surprisingly often overlooked. Everyone wants more sales but be more specific. Is there a new product range that you want to promote or an old product line that you want to move?

Your goal could instead be more focused on building up your marketing database, or perhaps you want to boost repeat purchases, so re-engaging with customers after their first purchase becomes critical.

Select your promotion and choose the reward

There is a wide selection of promotion types and rewards you can use, but it’s important to choose the approach that is best suited to reach your defined goal.

Let’s say you need more sign-ups for your newsletter for example. An effective approach could be a substantial discount coupon if they visit your web store and sign up within a certain period of time. When launching a new product line, organising a contest works well as it offers a great way to bring a novelty product into the limelight and you’ll be able to build up your marketing database too in the process.

When choosing a reward for a promotion, you need to find the balance between what you want as a marketer and what the participant gets in return. If you expect participants to put in a lot of effort, time or personal details, then be ready to reward them with a big prize to match. For example, a potential customers unlikely to part with numerous personal details to participate in a promotion which offers a free key ring, but may do if they have a chance of winning a car.

Craft your content and call to action

Remember to think about the elements that are going to make this a successful promotion.

Ensure there is a clear explanation about what the promotion includes and how to take part, and make sure there is a strong visual element for maximum appeal. Not including images of the product on promotion is a common mistake and a missed opportunity.

Finally, consider the amount of personal information you’re asking for up front. Asking for a life story at this stage will only make it more difficult and complex to participate. Instead, ask for just a few lines of critical information, ensuring the sign up process to the promotion is quick and simple.

 

By Marko Luhtala, RapidCampaign. 

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