Sales Promotion Technique

Laura Schneider says that marketing is everything that we do to reach and persuade prospects. Marketing consists of the measures we use to reach and persuade our prospects. All of marketing components will cost producers or manufacturers that in turn will influence the retail price of a product. To exploit a potentially lucrative market is not as easy as just opening a room, and playing music. Diligent marketing research will actually be crucial to the success of conducting personal selling. Careful consideration should be given to a number of different factors such as location, demographic detail, and existing competition of the prospective market place. This is done so to conduct marketing campaign effectively, which is a combination of advertising, personal sales, public relations, and sales promotions in a creative and cost-effective way to increase gross sales. 2. Sales Promotion Technique 2. 1. Web-based solution Basically, sales promotions are non-personal promotional activities that intend to have direct impact on sales of a product. Some activities that are in the sales promotion category include media and non-media marketing communication, increase consumers demand, and improve product availability. One of sales techniques that can help a company in maximizing its sales promotion efforts is the MediaVisor. The product is uniquely created to help salesperson of the company in executing and analyzing their interactive sales promotion programs much better (DoubleClick, 2006c). For example, figure 1 shows a company’s online sales promotion that aims at having direct impact to sales. Figure 1 Double Click’s Various Customers Solutions Source: www. oubleclick. com In order to simplify the sales promotion, MediaVisor can help Sprint Nextel in creating an easy-to-use interface, which is designed to reduce the number of clicks required to perform common actions. Therefore, the use of MediaVisor will significantly enhance the effectiveness of sales promotion process (DoubleClick, 2006c). 2. 2. Direct Mail O ne of the greatest marketing tools is direct mail, also known as database marketing. This kind of promotion is so effective since a company deliver information/offering directly to customers or prospects although it has one obvious drawback: high cost. According to one report, direct mail has a high â€Å"cost-per-thousand,† meaning it costs more to send message to a thousand people through direct mail than it does through television. However, this high cost-per-thousand can be offset by a much higher return rate. 2. 3. Personal Selling Another type of marketing tools is personal selling which is oral communication with potential buyers of a product with the intention of making a sale. The personal selling may focus initially on developing a relationship with the potential buyer, but will always ultimately end with an attempt to closing the sale. There are several benefits of conducting personal selling as follows: ? Personal selling is a face-to-face activity; customers therefore obtain a relatively high degree of personal attention ? The sales message can be customized to meet the needs of the customer ? Personal selling is a good way of getting across large amounts of technical or other complex product information ? The face-to-face sales meeting gives the sales force chance to demonstrate the product ? Frequent meetings between sales force and customer provide an opportunity to build good long-term relationships The main disadvantage of personal selling is the cost of employing a sales force and other utilities such as building rental. In addition to the basic pay package, a business needs to provide incentives to achieve sales such as commission and bonus arrangements and the equipment to make sales calls including car, travel and subsistence costs, mobile phone etc. Moreover, conducting personal selling has one limitation: personal selling is not a cost-effective way of reaching a large audience since a sales person can only call on one customer at a time. 2. 4. Cash Rebates/Cash back Selecting one or more target markets then developing a marketing mix (product, price, promotion & distribution) that satisfies the needs of the target market. One of the strategies is to give cash rebates/ cash back as incentives for target market to keep visiting stores By definition, cash back Program is an incentive program that rewards customers for repeatedly shopping at stores. Hence, it generates more revenue from particular selling points. For example, if a company wants to increase the number of sales from online stores, they may present additional discount for customers who purchase online.