Optimization of promotional campaign scenarios

Optimizing promotions is now one of the best marketing tools for developing sales. Implementing a promotional marketing campaign has a double advantage: attracting new leads or prospects and pushing loyal customers to buy. The actions to be carried out follow a commercial and marketing logic adapted to the company's products as well as to its development policy defined in its commercial strategy. Linking leads and customers within the same promotional campaign is an excellent solution to apply since it implies a single scenario for a double-level result.

Optimize your promotional campaign with a targeted marketing approach

On this page we will focus on predictive analysis of lead and customer behavior during promotional campaigns. In order to carry out an effective promotional campaign, the company will use marketing automation. Its definition corresponds to the triggering of a promotional campaign based on the behavior of customers or leads. The interest of marketing automation is the automatic sending of content, such as emails and SMS, to customers or leads, after the creation of scenarios defining the action to be launched.

Unlike email marketing, which sends emails to a list of customers to inform them of the launch of a new product or an exceptional discount, marketing automation addresses the lead or customer personally. He receives predefined information based on his behavior:

• email after cart abandonment on the company's website;
• announcement of a product added free of charge in the cart;
• possibility to order a product at a promotional price for a limited time.

Marketing automation allows you to work on the list of prospects or customers by assigning them, internally, a score or a category according to the action previously carried out, also called lead scoring. This can be implemented in parallel with lead nurturing.

Set up a promotional action through lead nurturing

Lead nurturing is a marketing strategy that perpetuates a relationship with leads, whether or not they have already started, with the aim of getting them to become customers. Through marketing actions that encourage them to buy the company's products using a conversion tunnel, leads are more easily transformed into customers.

What is a conversion tunnel in lead nurturing?

The company must first know its target customer, also called persona. Each target is the object of the creation of a data sheet. The marketing department then creates a conversion tunnel that will start from the target customer's problem until the act of purchase (and thus the resolution of his problem).

This sales tunnel can be created manually from data already in the company's possession or it can be worked on with the help of artificial intelligence integrated into the IT system. The sales tunnel is broken down into a succession of four stages.

1. Attracting traffic: appearances on social medias, blog posts, targeted keywords on the website.
2. Convert the lead: set up a sales page (or landing page) with calls to action or forms.
3. Close a sale: send emails, marketing automation.
4. Build customer loyalty: set up promotional actions, access to social networks and private groups, send ultra-targeted content via artificial intelligence that analyzes their behavior.

The progression from lead to customer is done progressively through privileged support and taking into account the real needs of the lead. This is what nurturing is all about, which means "maturation" with the various stages from the first visit to the website to the first order.

Why create a lead nurturing campaign?

The first goal is to gain the prospect's trust by offering him quality content that specifies the company's skills and experience. This awareness goes through different objectives that lead them from being a prospect to a new customer. Therefore, lead nurturing marketing adapts its content to the stage the prospect is at:

• level 1 : first visit of the website ;
• level 2 : regular visits ;
• level 3: exchanges and interactions;
• level 4: appointment setting.

The company does not address a newly acquired lead in the same way as a prospect who is already used to its products. The promotional campaign is therefore not the same. Thanks to its high-tech predictive tools, artificial intelligence now makes it possible to anticipate all the actions to be taken.

Optimizing a lead nurturing marketing campaign

The company will optimize its marketing campaign by tracking its leads:

• classification by type or by category allowing a personalized approach;
• regular contact by sending emails and sharing qualified content;
• establishment of an ongoing relationship.

Marketing automation is going to take all its significance here. It allows you to gain in efficiency and results through an optimized management of the lead file. Artificial intelligence will analyze the returns of the campaign and measure its effectiveness. It will provide all the useful information on the behavior of each lead. The company can then either continue in the same way or adapt its campaign, if necessary.

Prepare your promotional campaign based on customer behaviors

The company holds in its customer file a rich resource of information that will allow it to match its promotional campaign to its customers. In other words, it will use the previous behaviors of its customers to create an adapted promotional offer. The idea here is not to deal with leads - which can be part of another marketing action towards them - but only with customers who are more easily accessible. The latter have a higher conversion rate because they are former customers of the company.

Artificial intelligence is ideal for the implementation of promotional scenarios. Coupled with the company's CRM, the mathematical system learns from the content it is given and deduces an adapted marketing strategy. The first step is to collect all the information about the customers:

• number of customers;
• average cart;
• most purchased products;
• determination of the best margin;
• etc.

The person in charge of the promotion campaigns then integrates the objectives they want to achieve into the computer system. The computer performs a complex mathematical operation using algorithms and proposes several promotion scenarios. The choice of the promotion is then made according to the predictions made by the artificial intelligence.

Artificial intelligence coupled with the company's CRM and other tools (sales, accounting, finance, marketing, etc.) saves a considerable amount of time in developing the best scenario for the company's promotional actions.

Why not have a promotional campaign focused solely on price?

We would like to draw your attention to the promotional campaign focused on the price of the products. The first reflex of a company launching its promotional campaign is to lower the selling price. We will see that this is never established randomly. It is not a matter of applying a multiplier without understanding the internal composition of the selling price. Thus, the marketing price is composed of:

• purchase price excluding tax of the product;
• personnel costs;
• costs of premises, storage;
• operating costs;
• delivery costs;
• margin taken by the company;
• VAT.

When a company decides to run a promotional campaign, it can only change one variable: the margin (VAT also varies, but it has no effect on the profit of the sale). This means that by promoting a product, and therefore lowering its selling price, only the margin is affected downwards, along with the company's profit. However, the balance can be partially restored by selling more to customers and by increasing the available cash flow.

Working only on price when developing promotional campaigns also harms the product itself. Leads and customers may legitimately expect an offer on a product they covet and thus delay their purchase period. Furthermore, a promotion period that comes around too regularly can skew the perception of the real price and destroy the company's marketing strategy. One of the most striking examples concerns stores selling sofas where the customer knows that the price displayed never reflects the amount he will actually pay. By allowing such practices, these stores have partly ruined their reputation for serious pricing policies.

It is therefore wise to diversify its promotional campaigns by proposing, in addition to discounts on prices:

• coupons offering a discount on a second item purchased (the margin is therefore less affected);
• bonus gifts after X euros purchased;
• access to private groups where the lead and the customer can benefit from advantages.

For any promotional campaign, it is imperative to know the cost of the actions in their entirety. This means that the margin lost on promotional items must be included in the calculation. However, the company must not forget the amount of gifts and coupon offers that also lead to a decrease in margin.

Artificial intelligence enables campaign forecasts that are perfectly adapted to the company. It provides accurate predictive elements on which both the sales and marketing departments can rely.