If you’re a distributor who’s new to incentives—or you have an incentive program but you’re looking to shake things up—short term promotions are a fast and fun way to engage your customers and grow your sales. They’re a great way to launch a new product or to address seasonality even without having a new or seasonal product line to focus on.
Along with growing your sales, there’s a lot of different short-term goals that you can achieve with a promotion. Here’s a few ways that different promotion strategies can benefit your larger incentive program.
There’s so much you can do with a short-term promotion, depending on the strategy that you decide to take. They can come with a variety of added benefits, like…
As a distributor, you’re not the only one who stands to benefit from a sales growth promotion. If your customers end up spending more on a specific product, that’s going to benefit the manufacturers and suppliers further up your sales channel. Get your supplier in on the action. If you center the promotion around their product lines, they’ll be more willing to support the promotion with marketing dollars. A promotion can be a lot easier when there’s multiple groups helping put it together, particularly if you’re new to promotions or incentive programs and can boost your ability to pitch for MDF dollars in the future.
This kind of partnership has benefits beyond your supplier’s monetary contribution—working together on a project like this has the potential to vastly improve your channel communication, which always improves doing business. Plus, looping them in can lead create an endowment effect in them—because they’ve contributed to the promotion, they feel invested in its success and are more likely to help you work towards that goal.
As you’ve probably heard a hundred times already, having data (read: good data) on your customers is key to doing business in the Internet Age. But what if you don’t really know your customer base all that well? What do you do if you know it’s important to have data, but not how to get it?
A short-term promotion offers a great, easy way to quickly get a lot of basic information on your customers. While your customers feel motivated to buy more of a certain product, you can also take the opportunity to collect, organize, and centralize the contact information they give you, clearing away dead emails and phone numbers.
Once you have that basic information, you can get more complex—run a survey that rewards participants for sharing their top business goals and challenges or how many distributors they typically buy from. Plus, you can carry that benefit back to your suppliers, who might be just as (if not more) in need of information on their channel. If you share the data you collect with your supplier, it can further strengthen your relationship with them.
Let’s say you have a specific group within your customer base that you want to reach better for whatever reason—whether it’s to grow your sales with them or to better recognize and build a sense of community with them. A promotion can help with that!
With short-term promotions, people often assume that they just apply across the board to any and all customers. And while that’s often what we do, invite-only promotions offer a little bit more complexity for a lot of payoff. You could…
So, with all that being said, how do you go about achieving those goals? There are a few different promotion strategies you might choose from:
There’s so much you can do as a distributor with a special or short-term promotion, whether your goal is to expand your data analytics capabilities, target a specific part of your customer base, strengthen your relationship with your supplier, reward your top-tier customers, or build community across your channel.
The great thing about short-term promotions is that they’re memorable and repeatable—and if you use them to meet your customers where they’re at and address their needs, you’ll see the results quickly!