We all know the world is hectic. We can all feel it, every day. We can feel it whilst hurrying to work, whilst cooking a quick dinner, and we can feel it when buying our necessities. As much as we’d all like to dedicate a lot of time and money whenever going through any kind of customer experience, we simply don’t have a surplus of any of those.

As customers and shoppers, we all need simplicity, velocity, and affordability in order to go through with buying. As a retail business, you need tools to automate and manage pricing strategies, discounts, special offers, and overall customer experience in order to go through with selling these days.

The retail and eCommerce landscape has become so competitive that offering discounts is a must, but it’s still not enough—you need them personalized, consistent, and optimized; you need discounts that help you increase conversions. And these are the kind of discounts that promotion engines allow you to offer.

A Quick Reminder: What Is a Promotion Engine?

Simply defined, a promotion engine is a tool that automates the process of applying discounts and promotions in retail and eCommerce. Unlike traditional methods that involve manual adjustments and take time, patience, and personnel, often giving in return errors and limitations, promotion engines operate independently on predefined rules.

If we would have to compress its importance, it would be in these three main features:

• Automation: This enables you to remove the need for manual work, making the process incomparably faster and more efficient.
• Personalization: Allows defining promotion rules to tailor promotions to diverse customer needs.
• Real-Time Adjustments: Provides a smooth customer experience by applying discounts instantly at checkout.

These are simultaneously the most important features that can help your business improve conversions by optimizing promotional strategies and minimizing errors, so let’s hop deeper into all that.

Why Do Promotions Matter for Conversions?

Nothing exists by accident, and promotions and discounts are no exception. They are the best yet found shortcut to tap into consumer psychology and create a sense of urgency, value, and exclusivity. Be it through limited-time offers that drive shoppers to take action faster, percentage and nominal discounts that make them feel like they are getting a good deal, concepts like FOMO (Fear of Missing Out), or the principle of reciprocity, promotions lead customers toward the need to buy something. According to the Google Consumer Survey released by RetailMeNot, Inc., shoppers reported that promotions influence their decisions on where to shop, what to buy, as well as the likelihood of future purchases, and even reduce the feeling of buyer’s remorse.

They can be a great way to attract new customers, but more importantly, they are the proven way to customer retention—nurturing existing relationships and improving customer loyalty, keeping them coming back through a sense of appreciation and reward is what keeps you in the business. Moreover, they directly influence your revenue growth by encouraging larger purchases and increasing sales. According to 2024 Discount Marketing Statistics, no less than 67% of U.S. consumers made unplanned purchases after being offered a discount, and we can all agree this is not a negligible number. 

But can’t you reap all of these benefits with manual promotions as well? Short answer—no. Manual systems, besides the common challenges like being time-consuming and laborious, also struggle to target the right consumers for specific promotions and are prone to mistakes that can only cause you financial losses (such as applying wrong discount rates or missing promotion periods).

How a Promotion Engine Helps Maximize Conversions

Maximized conversions come through many layers, from good CTAs, provided social proof, contests and giveaways, multiple payment options, video marketing, loyalty programs, and exit-intent popups, to limited-time offers and discounts, great UX, and personalized customer experience. Promotion engines can help you cover a lot of those.

1. Customization & Targeting

Promotion engines allow businesses to create a wide variety of custom promotions tailored to specific customer needs. Qerdos is an example of a flexible definition of promotion rules—with its system, you can easily create tailored campaigns that target specific customer segments, such as offering unique discounts for first-time customers or based on certain product categories.

By allowing for highly customizable and targeted promotions, you can drive engagement and encourage repeat purchases, as you can offer promotions that feel more relevant to your customers’ buying patterns or preferences.

2. Automation & Efficiency

We mentioned how automation removes the need for manual intervention, reducing in that way chances of errors and saving significant amounts of time. Promotion engines apply discounts without needing someone from your staff or your customers to manually enter coupon codes or adjust prices, which allows you to run promotions at scale.

Moreover, automation allows you an aspect that manual promotions could never offer—modifying offers based on live data. Let’s say you made a promotion that’s performing surprisingly well—you can easily expand it to a broader audience. In the same way, a promotion that isn’t gaining the expected traction can be adjusted quickly.

3. Multi-Channel Consistency

Automated promotions are the way to consistency—utilizing a promotion engine allows you to provide the same promotions across different channels to your customers. Since we’re in the digital era, they might likely interact with your brand across multiple touchpoints, including your website, social media, email campaigns, or actual physical stores. Consistency in promotions across all these platforms strengthens your brand messaging, and improving the customer experience is the guaranteed bonus.

You know those big Zara sales during holidays, when you browse the entire site to find everything you might possibly (not) need, and then finally get to the store during the weekend to try on the items in person? Wouldn’t be quite an experience if the discounts from the website were not applied in the store, would it?

4. A/B Testing & Data-Driven Insights

Promotion engines work on the basis of machine learning and AI, collecting precious data and identifying key data points to continually optimize promotions and increase conversions. A/B testing allows you to test different promotional strategies on subsets of customers, so that you can apply the most effective strategy to a larger audience, ensuring continuous improvement.

With ongoing analysis, you will be able to understand what works best for your specific audience and fine-tune your offers. This is the data-driven approach in action—helping you maximize the chances of increasing conversion rates.

5. Fraud Prevention & Smart Discounting

Besides being prone to errors, manual promotions are also prone to being abused. Promotion engines help prevent this and ensure promotions are used as intended. They can incorporate safeguards, like limiting the number of discounts one customer can claim or using smart discounting based on customer lifetime value (CLV).

When you’re aiming to offer a large discount to a loyal, long-term customer, you don’t want it to be used by new, unverified accounts. This kind of access can be limited by promotion software.

Best Practices for Using a Promotion Engine

First and foremost, you should align your promotions with your business goals. If your business is, for instance, focused on customer acquisition, you should use discounts for new customers or first-time purchase offers. On the other hand, if you are more focused on customer retention, you should offer loyalty rewards, exclusive discounts for repeat customers, or VIP-only promotions.

The next piece of advice is to use segmentation for more targeted promotions so that you can target specific customer groups with promotions most relevant to them. You can segment customers based on their purchasing behavior, geographic location, or product preferences. A promotion engine can help you create tailored campaigns, for example, a location-based offer of a discount on winter products for customers in colder regions.

Don’t forget that successful promotion strategies require constant tracking and adjustment. Monitor key metrics like conversion rates, cart abandonment rates, and return on investment (ROI) to understand how well your promotions are performing. If your promotion successfully drives traffic but drives low conversions, you should adjust the offer or improve targeting. On the other hand, in the cases of high cart abandonment rates, you could experiment with exit-intent promotions or time-limited discounts to push your customers toward completing the purchase.

Last but not least, integrating a promotion engine with a loyalty program can provide added value to both your business and the customer. Rewarding loyal customers with personalized offers and keeping them coming back translates into rewarding yourself.

Choosing the Right Promotion Engine for Your Business

You always want to be optimistic about your business and foresee it growing. In that sense, you should choose a scalable promotion engine that will allow you to run more complex promotions and manage a growing customer base without compromising performance.

You also want it to be able to seamlessly integrate with your existing tech stack, be it your eCommerce platform, CRM system, email marketing tools, and/or payment processors. The point is that you need a solution that ensures consistent application of promotions across all touchpoints.

Finally, don’t forget how important it is for this kind of digital solution to be user-friendly, as both technical and non-technical teams should be able to easily create, adjust, and monitor promotions. Aim for an intuitive interface with minimal setup required to start running your promotions.

Qerdos allows for unlimited customized promotions with minimal technical setup, easy-to-use tools that empower your team to collaborate, and flexible integrations that adapt to businesses of all sizes. Take control of your hectic market—choose wisely.

Smart Engines Maximize Promotions for Greater Conversions

In summary, an efficient promotion engine allows you to deliver cross-channel promotions, create targeted and unified customer experiences, and track session data across all channels. With an API-first approach, you ensure a seamless, cohesive experience, while gaining full control through a single centralized system. Why play harder when you can play smarter? Streamline your promotional efforts, optimize engagement, and ultimately drive higher conversions.

After all, your competition is already doing it. The question is: Are you in the game, or sitting on the sidelines?