Optimizing your eCommerce store with deals management tools

Running an eCommerce store can be an incredibly tricky business, especially when you’re managing a stack of different deals and promotions. 

• How do you ensure that your deals are effective without giving away unnecessary discounts?
• How do you keep track of all the promotions you're running?
• When you start to produce results, how do you harness that data to learn more about your customers?

This is where deal management tools become essential. 

In this post, we’ll explore the vital components of deals management technologies that help you create, manage, measure, and optimize your promotional strategy. 

Deals management tools: are they popular?

We've come a long way since Coca-Cola issued the first-ever discount in the late 1800s. Nevertheless, deals remain one of the biggest reasons why consumers choose one brand over another.  

There is a clear opportunity for retailers to use dedicated technologies to support a consistent promotional strategy. However, many are barely aware of their existence.

All too often, brands fall into the trap of issuing broad, one-size-fits-all discounts to drive a short-term spike in sales. This requires very little technological assistance and carries several after-effects, such as:

• Conditioning customers to expect discounts
• Giving away value to customers who would have purchased without an offer
• Failing to satisfy customers' unique demands through personalization  

The antidote is a carefully managed strategy that sees the retailer using various deals only when their goals can be driven. For this, you'll need a deals management tool. 

What is a deals management tool?

A deals management tool is a specialized software designed to help eCommerce businesses streamline and optimize their promotional strategies. 

These tools provide a comprehensive platform for creating, organizing, and tracking various deals, promotions, and discounts, all while delivering valuable insights into customer behavior. 

There are three major benefits to using these technologies, which are as follows: 

‍Deal management

When you're running tens of promotions simultaneously, you can quickly lose track of where your sales are coming from. The role of the platform is to make it simple for the user to make changes to their campaigns and provide a crystal clear view of performance. 

‍Campaign optimization

Deals management tools can take your eCommerce business to new heights. The right technology will highlight opportunities to boost results, enable you to run experiments, and swiftly apply the learnings. 

It can also reveal which types of customers are driving you forward in terms of their revenue contribution and which are lagging behind.   

‍Customer experience

With deals management tools, you can set up campaigns with specific rules. This paves the way for personalized promotions that align with your business goals and create a much better experience for the shopper.

Ultimately, deals management tools empower businesses to leverage promotions strategically, enhancing customer satisfaction while maximizing profitability. 

How to pick the right solution

When you start searching for a technology to manage all your deals and promotions, you'll soon see how different each one is.

While each will have different features and integrations, there are some fundamentals to look out for.  

‍Campaign creation and management 

Campaign management tools allow retailers to handle all aspects of creating a promotion from scratch. This includes things like:

‍Setting objectives

Outlining your objectives at the start means your tool can report on the right results. Most commonly, these are driving conversions or increasing average order values (AOV), but this really is up to you. 

‍Rules

To make sure your offers are personalized and targeted, you'll need to set some rules. 

You can go with something simple, like a '10% off' promotion for visitors exhibiting an intent to exit your site. When the visitor displays the signal (e.g. lengthy dwell time, or mouse movement toward the close window button) the offer appears. This is a great way to reduce abandonment and drive conversions.

You can go more specific by delivering the same offer but only to customers with a high cart value. When you convert more of these orders, you should see an improvement in your AOV.

Here are some other examples of campaigns and the associated rules:

• ‍Offer: 'Get 15% off when you spend $70'
  Rule: For customers with a cart value under $70 ‍
• Offer: 'You're new here! Here's 10% off your first order'
  Rule: Customer is not logged in‍
• Offer: 'Get 5% off dining tables and chairs' 
  Rule: Customer is browsing homeware category

Offer format

When it comes to displaying your offers, most technologies opt for the overlay: a small, banner-like ad that usually appears at the bottom, the side, or the top of your page. The idea of an overlay is to grab your attention and get you to consider the offer.

As well as overlays, you might find some more unique formats. For instance, with RevLifter's Intelligent Offer Platform you can recapture customers who leave your site in search of a discount by creating your very own coupon page. 

You can also build an on-site Offer Wallet for customers to store all the deals and recommendations they receive throughout their journey. 

Of course, the format has to fit natively with the rest of your eCommerce experience, so this is an important point to consider.

‍Design

Onto design, and here is where some technologies set themselves apart. 

Choosing colors, copy, and images might seem like a task that's fairly similar across different platforms. However, some technologies aren't as flexible as others, which makes it difficult to create an on-brand offer.

We advise viewing some offers created by different brands within the platform and seeing how they blend in with the rest of their experience. 

To give you an idea of the standard to aim for, here's an example of a promotion created by luxury activewear brand Splits59 on the RevLifter platform. 

Testing and measurement

The right platform will provide detailed analytics to track the performance of your deals and promotions. This allows you to see which offers are generating the most revenue, giving you the scope to optimize your deals accordingly.

We could talk about testing and measurement for a while. Really, you're after a few fundamentals.

You're looking for a platform that allows you to A/B test different offers to determine which is the most effective. Once you have those results, it's helpful to have a feature that automatically pushes the winning variant more than the losing one.

You should also find a platform with the potential to do more for your eCommerce business by highlighting trends and insights around your customers. For example, if you find that customers tend to show exit-intent signals (and redeem an abandonment offer) on a certain page or stage in their journey, you should try to fix the problem. 

Conclusion

Deals management tools are valuable to any eCommerce store looking to optimize not only their promotions but also their business in general. 

Managing stacks of broad promotions makes for an inefficient process that likely costs you revenue in applying discounts when you don't need to. Switching over to a more strategic method can have you driving your goals and satisfying your customers through personalization.

Additionally, the testing and measurement capabilities of deals management tools allow you to optimize your promotions, enabling you to build a conversion-driving formula.

To get an idea of what these technologies can do in the context of your goals and unique requirements, feel free to reach out for a test drive of RevLifter's Intelligent Offer Platform.