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Training Thursday: OroCommerce Promotions in Action

December 21, 2017 | Oro Team

The fact that 80% of shoppers self-describe themselves as promotion-sensitive is enough to inspire your next promotional campaign. Promotions can be used to drive engagement, pique buyers’ interest, showcase new products, and grow your conversion rate. Promotions are an integral part of any marketing strategy and with OroCommerce, they are easy to launch and manage. Today’s Training Thursday will share a few tips on effectively using discounts and leveraging promotions with OroCommerce.   

Best Practices for Running Promotions

Unlike sales, promotions aren’t about getting rid of slow-moving or excess inventory.  Promotions are about increasing demand and popularity for a product.Special offers create a strong buying impulse and encourage more purchases. The incentive often comes in the form of a percentage discount or a giveaway with the purchase.

To make sure your promotions benefit not only your customers but also adds to your bottom line, design your promotions to encourage value-creating behaviors in your customers.

Promotions should:

  • Entice buyers to purchase higher margins items.
  • Induce customers to place standing orders to create predictable demand and guaranteed sales.
  • Boost cross-selling of related products.
  • Shift customer purchases to channels with lower customer acquisition and service costs (e.g. online rather than offline).

To get the most out of promotions, use these practical tips as a design guide:

  • Each promotion should encourage only one behavioral pattern at a time. To motivate new buyers, segment your customer base and reward their first order with a free add-on item (use the Buy X Get Y  option in OroCommerce). To reward customer loyalty, offer repeat customers a Line Item discount on a higher-margin product.
  • Offer a limited number of discounts to make them more exclusive and create desire.
  • Confirm that all discounts you’ve planned will create a sales volume required to maintain or increase the gross margin.

    For example, if your current margin is 15% and you’re running a promotion that offers 5% off, you need to increase sales by 50% to make a profit. With the same gross margin and a moderate discount of 10%, make sure to boost sales volume by 200%. To provide the same 10% off the price while having the gross margin of 20%, grow your sales by ‘only’ 100% to keep your business profitable.

Launching Promotions with OroCommerce

OroCommerce provides a powerful tool to launch and manage promotions. The discount options available out of the box include:

  • Promotions per order where a discount is applied to the total order amount.
  • Promotions per line item where a discount applies to each item or line item total.
  • Buy X Get Y where a customer purchases a minimum quantity of product X to get the price off the product Y. This can be a ‘buy one get one for free’ deal (with the discount for Y item set to 100%) or a percentage or specific dollar amount of the line item total.  
  • Shipping promotions where a discount is configured specifically for order shipping.

Depending on settings, all discounts deduct either a fixed dollar amount (e.g.,$15) or a specific percentage (15%) from the total order.

promotions-discount-options

Discount options available in OroCommerce 1.5

You can build a schedule for promotions to be automatically activated and deactivated on any day or at any time. You aren’t limited to one-time campaigns and you don’t have to hassle; with manually reactivating each promotional event. Simply schedule a row of activities once and let OroCommerce launch and deactivate them for you.

By default, any customer or customer group can see discounted items. However, you can restrict the visibility of special offers to only targeted customers and customer groups. This delivers customers the highly personalized buying experience they want by showing them only items that match their profiles.

You can select from one of two discount strategies for your promotions. The Combine All Discounts will allow discount options to be combined while the Best Value Discounts the Only strategy allows only the discount that will provide the customer or a customer user the best value.

In OroCommerce, you can launch several different promotions for the same product, manage their priority, and set the rules on how they run.

For more information on configuring, creating, and managing promotions as well as managing discounts directly in orders, see the OroCommerce documentation.

Collection of Video Tutorials on Using Promotions

The use of promotions is a complex topic. To help you better understand how to take advantage of promotions using OroCommerce, we’ve created a series of training videos dedicated to this topic.

Check them out in our Media Library:  

  • How to create promotions
    This comprehensive video tutorial gives a broad overview of the OroCommerce’s Promotions function. It covers different types of promotions and discount strategies available in our B2B eCommerce system and teaches how to enable/disable promotions as well as applying sort order and restrictions. By watching this video, you will also learn how to create coupons individually or as a batch, link coupons to promotions, and apply them directly to orders.
  • How to create an order promotion
    This introduces the concept of per order promotions and demonstrates how to set them up in the application.
  • How to create line item promotion
    By watching this video, you’ll learn about configuring per item promotions.
  • How to create Buy X Get Y promotion
    Watch this clip to find out what type of discount the Buy X Get Y promotion provides and how to apply it.
  • How to create shipping promotions
    This video provides step-by-step instructions on how to set up a discount for the shipping options configured under Shipping Method Integrations.

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