Spring is here and flowers are blooming, a season during which everything revives and consumers are back. Retailers start getting plans to figure out what types of products they should launch and how to have a strong launch at the right time. Consumers are tempted to buy what they like at a more favorable price and feel happy with the various kinds of price deductions and discounts offered by retailers during this period of time.

Sales promotion is a great way to boost retail sales performance. You can use it to increase sales, encourage customer loyalty or generate brand awareness. Yet this powerful instrument for increasing sales and margin requires skills to administer and is difficult to use effectively.

To start a promotion process retailers need to have a clear goal for their promotions, be it reducing backlog, increasing sales or developing brand identity. Some objectives can be achieved simultaneously. Some needs to be reviewed from time to time. Retailers are required to determine if specific promotions are meeting the company’s strategic objectives.

Another important aspect of sales promotion is to make sure it generates noticeable lift in sales. Therefore, when creating promotion rules retailers need other effective rule conditions to get an increase in sales sufficient to offset promotion costs. For example, its priority, effective period, frequency limit or exclusiveness.

This is obviously a complicated job for backend staff. It even appears as an impossible task if retailers do it manually. Old-style POS with just few and simple promotion rules does not meet the requirements too. User experience can hardly be satisfied.

Retailers that embraces technology sees smart promotion engine as a way to simplify work. The engine can help backend staff to identify the right promotion type to meet the goal, easily pre-set promotion rules and allow them to test thoroughly before implementation. Without duplication of work, the real time synchronization technology of the engine enables rule settings to be applicable at all sales channels and automatically triggered according to preset conditions at POS settlement.

Having the right promotion engine enabled by technologies helps retailers execute targeted and customized promotional campaigns, bringing them higher productivity and increased efficiencies.