A study by Claremount Graduate University proved that shoppers who get coupons or discounts are happier, less stressed, and are less anxious. The study also found that people actually enjoyed receiving coupons more than gifts.

Ecommerce vendors who know the psychology associated with discounted sales and coupons use it to leverage their business goals. To help such vendors meet their targets, Salesforce Commerce Cloud offers a unique feature called Campaigns, which allows merchants to set up different kinds of promotions and track the resulting conversions.

Conversion tracking is the end-to-end process of tracking a customer as they click on a promotional banner on the Home page, browse through the products listed under that category, add the products that are of interest to them, and, finally, successfully check out. Conversion tracking is primarily used for analyzing why customers decide to abandon their cart despite showing interest in the products and to find ways to prevent it from happening.

Marketing and Sales go hand-in-hand

Ecommerce vendors are constantly on the lookout for ways to boost their sales, especially during the launch of a new product or season end or during festivals, when the customers are less likely to abandon their cart. For example, a popular smartphone company is known to organize pre-booking and pre-launch sales for their gadgets to understand the market and its interest in the yet-to-be-launched products. This intel is later used to improve the quality, marketing campaigns, and even specs of the product.

Promote it to sell it

Unlike physical stores, there is no direct contact between the merchants and their customers when they shop online. So how do merchants communicate with their customers about promotions and sales?

The Salesforce Commerce Cloud ‘Campaigns’ feature allows merchants to create and schedule Experiences (promotions) for a targeted set of potential customers.

Salesforce e-commerce provides four types of Experiences; in this blog we explore promotions.

Promotions are rules that define the details of the discount given to shoppers. They are available for three aspects: product, order, and shipping promotion.

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Game on: the qualifier round

Before creating the promotion, the customers are first categorized into ‘qualifiers’, based on their geographic location or the type of membership they hold. Qualifiers are used for triggering a promotion with the help of coupon codes sent in promotional emails, or to shoppers belonging to different customer groups, or using source codes.

Let’s check them out in detail:

  • Coupons: Can be created in Salesforce Commerce Cloud itself or can be imported. Coupons created on SFCC can be merchant-defined single coupons, merchant-defined multiple coupons, or system-generated coupons. The difference between merchant-defined single and multiple coupons is the number of times it can be used by shoppers for various promotions. When a coupon is used for a campaign all the promotions under the campaign inherit the coupon.
  • Customer Groups: Can be used to show filtered content to a specific set of shoppers based on their demographics, or even hold different types of membership privileges.
  • Source code: Can be used with the help of Google Ads. For instance, when a customer sees a product promotion on a different website through Google ad and clicks on it, the landing page can automatically show this discounted product. This can be achieved by embedding the source code in a cookie to trigger the discount.

Sale! Sale! Sale!

Promotions can be of many types such as the ‘Buy 1 Get 1 Free’, ‘Get 50% Off on Select Products’, ‘Get Free Shipping on Purchase of $100 Worth of Products’, etc. It entirely depends on the merchant to decide which customer gets what type of promotion.

Now that there is a clear understanding of qualifiers and promotions, we can see how a merchant can set up Campaigns using Salesforce e-commerce.

Run that campaign

The campaign is set up as an Experience within SFCC. Once that is done the merchant can specify the start and end date for the campaign, and add the already created qualifiers and promotions to create the campaign.

Salesforce Cloud Commerce will automatically start the campaign if there is no start date specified and will also run it endlessly if there is no end day specified.It is as simple as that.

Aspire Systems can be your reliable partner if you are looking at achieving your sales goals. With our robust Salesforce eCommerce implementation and merchandising activities, you will be soon at a better place than you can expect.

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  3. Turn Customers into Brand Advocates with This Simple Guide to Creating Loyalty Programs Using SFCC

 

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