Do Promotions Work? The Proof is in the Pudding

When is the last time you ran a promotion? If you haven’t in a while you really should step up your game. Promotions are useful tools to help boost consumer engagement and drive customer loyalty. It gives you an opportunity to communicate with your customers and reward them for responding. Overall, they drive engagement; and according to our research an engaged consumer is likely to spend more time and more money in the MicroMarket, resulting in increased revenues and profits. Below are commonly asked questions with best practices from industry experts.

I worry about product expiring? I Stocked too many chips!

Effective promotions allow operators to:

• Engage and reward customers by offering discounts on popular items or giveaways for using the promotion.

• Influence purchases by discounting fresh products before they expire or healthy products as part of a wellness at work initiative.

• Introduce new products.

• Reward preferred payment use such as Accounts by offering a percentage off.

How should I implement promotions?

Southern Refreshment, an award-winning coffee service and vending company based in Georgia and a customer of 365 has been successfully utilizing promotions in their MicroMarkets. They have developed a few different methods to keep customers coming back for more.

“When implementing a promotion, it always helps to follow current trends or events. Whether it’s a big game, holiday or the latest diet fad, a promotion that ties in with these is a great idea,” said Renee King, Marketing Manager at Southern Refreshment, “with health on everyone’s mind, Southern is currently running a promotion for the New Year called ‘New Year New You’. We have highlighted better-for-you Choice Plus items to run for 25% off.”

“Southern's most successful promotion of 2015 was “Fresh Food Wednesdays” 35% off all fresh food all day,” said Chris Hart, Director of MicroMarkets,” In some accounts, customers would looked forward to the promotion and plan on staying in the office for lunch.” Chris Hart, Director of MicroMarket.

Having a dedicated marketing team to develop and manage promotions is beneficial to ensuring that promotions are launched successfully and that they are properly analyzed. However many software platforms have features that assist in deploying analyzing promotions without employing an entire team.

“We have operators that utilize our digital signage platform to feature a wide array of promotions geared toward a particular product that each location offers, that we manage and schedule,” said Tyler D’Orazio, Client Success Manager at 365 Retail Markets.

“Combining digital signage, kiosk backgrounds and messaging through mymarketaccount.com is the ultimate in omni-channel advertising within Micromarkets” said Joe Hessling, 365 CEO.