Manage Promotions Centrally

Learning Objectives

After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:

• Explain how Global Promotions Management (GPM) delivers a unified omnichannel experience while offering rewards.
  
• Describe how Offer Management helps activate promotions by delivering targeted communications across channels.
  

Need for Unified Promotions

Think about the last time you offered a good deal to your customers—maybe 50% off on your most popular jacket. Now imagine trying to run that same promotion across different regions, with different currencies, and a mix of online and in-store channels. Sounds messy, doesn’t it?

For starters, there’s no one-size-fits-all when it comes to promotions. In today’s hyper-connected world, a brand’s success depends on delivering the correct promotion, to the correct customer, and at the correct time. However, complex rules, multiple teams, and disparate systems create a tangled web of challenges. Ultimately, promotions fail to deliver measurable returns.

That’s where Salesforce Global Promotions Management (GPM) and Offer Management come in. Together, they provide consistent rules, centralized tracking, and real-time analytics, reducing errors and making promotions work better.

In this module, you gain an overview of the capabilities of Global Promotions Management and Offer Management.

Explore Global Promotions Management

GPM offers everything you need to create and manage promotions in one place, making it easier to drive sales and boost engagement.

Managing promotions consists of the following stages.

• Create a promotion from predefined templates.
  
• Execute the promotion with evaluation logic.
  

Here's a short overview of these stages.

Use GPM to quickly create promotions using a guided setup flow to define the audience, products, channels, triggers, rewards, and more. Use prebuilt templates to easily create promotions, and define the eligibility and rewards. You can also create promotions with custom rules that determine when a customer is eligible. Design and activate emails based on the promotion’s branding requirements, plan and schedule the promotions, and then monitor promotion performance all within the same tool.

Setting up promotions takes careful planning, including deciding how the system evaluates orders that qualify for multiple promotions. GPM simplifies the process of defining promotion evaluation when multiple eligible promotions are applicable to the same order.

The evaluation engine classifies promotions into three subgroups based on their type.

• Cart rewards
  
• Line rewards
  
• Cross-line rewards
  

For example, the engine categorizes a promotion that applies a discount to the total cart value as a cart reward, a discount on a specific product as a line reward, and a “buy shoes and get socks free” offer as a cross-line reward. The template you choose when setting up the promotion determines the subgroup the engine assigns.

Choose one of three evaluation criteria to define how promotions are applied within each subgroup.

• Stacked: The engine evaluates the eligible promotions against the cart and applies them all.
  
• Highest Discount: The engine analyzes the promotions and applies the one with the maximum discount.
  
• First Eligible Promotion: The engine evaluates the promotions by priority order and applies the first eligible promotion.
  

With promotion evaluation logic, you can prevent stacking too many discounts while ensuring a consistent customer experience and aligning your promotion strategy with business goals.

Promotions are effective only when you distribute them optimally to reach their target audience. Offer Management bridges the gap between promotion and distribution.

Meet Offer Management

You can communicate promotions to customers through offers to get them interested in a product or service. Offers are the deals and incentives you share with customers about the promotion on a specific channel.

Salesforce’s Offer Management gives you granular control over how to present promotions to customers through channels such as email, text messages, website widgets, and banners. Use Offer Management to create content assets, including images, URLs, text, and more. Choose from a subgroup of the promotion’s target audience and deliver the offer through various channels.

The offer lifecycle consists of three phases.

• Offer creation: In this phase, you add details such as images, videos, start and end dates, and offer codes.
  
• Offer execution: In this phase, you decide which eligible offers a customer sees and how to make the offer live through messages, emails, web personalization, and so on.
  
• Offer tracking: In this phase, you analyze conversion rates, click-through rates, and channel performance to gauge how well offers are performing.
  

Here’s a look at an example to further understand promotions and offers.

Distinguish Between Promotions and Offers

A retail company uses GPM to manage its promotions. The marketing team sets up a 10% Off Activewear promotion by showing the most relevant offer for each group. The goal is to deepen engagement with specific customer groups by showing them the incentive that is most relevant to them.

The team uses Offer Management to tailor the promotion into distinct offers distributed through different channels.

• Customers who frequently browse outdoor gear on the mobile app see an offer called Exclusive! Get 10% Off Jackets.
  
• Fitness enthusiasts visiting the website see an offer called Stay Cool While You Train—10% Off Performance Tees.
  
• Inactive customers with the app receive this push notification: Fresh Looks for Your Next Adventure! 10% off Joggers — Tap to Shop Now.
  

The promotion reaches customers through different offers based on their interests and the channels they’re engaging in. When a customer makes a purchase, the promotion rules run and apply the discount on the cart. In this way, promotions and offers help deliver personalized incentives to the correct set of customers.

In Summary

Promotions are essential to improving brand awareness and influencing customers’ buying decisions. But they work only when they’re relevant and delivered seamlessly across channels. Use GPM to ensure promotions are created centrally and applied consistently. Use Offer Management to tailor the customer experience with the correct message at the correct time.