For Digital Promotions, All Signs Point to Performance

Today’s digital trends allow CPGs and retailers to easily incorporate promotions into their performance-based marketing.

Digital promotions are widely recognized as one of the most powerful tactics in marketing. Featuring a value-based call to action for limited-time savings, a promotion can change consumer behavior by motivating them to try a new product, purchase it again or increase basket size. These dynamics make promotions particularly effective at driving results for CPG brands and grocery retailers.

Led by Procter & Gamble discontinuing its printed brandSAVER coupon insert in 2023, the number of paper coupons is down 18% year-to-date, according to Quotient’s internal reporting. But as the physical coupon is being phased out, digital versions have quickly filled the void and brought new technology perks such as audience personalization, retailer load-to-card integration and in-flight measurement—resulting in more efficient campaign strategies.

New Framework Gives Greater Utility to Coupons

In the not-so-distant past when brands planned print coupon campaigns, the cost and distribution were tied to the number of coupons printed. As digital promotions emerged, the industry’s programming metric turned to activations—when a consumer digitally clips, saves or otherwise “activates” the offer with intent to use it on a future purchase. The problem? Activations may signal intent, but they don’t necessarily signal a sale.

Today, as brands and retailers increasingly focus on performance-based marketing, Quotient has pioneered an innovative model to plan and execute digital promotions based on redemptions and duration—or the amount of time the promotion is available in the market. The shift from activations to redemptions favors CPG brands and retailers, explained Henri Lellouche, Quotient’s Vice President of Retail and Partnerships.

Under the industry’s traditional model, digital promotions can suddenly vanish once they hit their activations target, which could be in a matter of days from campaign launch. This scenario makes it nearly impossible for brands and retailers to coordinate on merchandising efforts to support the promotion. The new duration model allows advertisers to buy time on Quotient’s promotions network in increments of seven, 14, 21 or 28 days and guarantee the promotion’s sufficiency during that period.

Implementing promotions in the context of duration is a game-changer that empowers brands and retailers to confidently communicate and amplify the lower price on media channels, ensure coupon galleries are well stocked with offers that last longer, incorporate the promotion into shelf signage and even add it into the retailer’s print or digital circular—all tremendous B2B benefits to the brand-retailer relationship. Essentially, the certainty of offer availability turns the promotion into an even better marketing tool for the entire ecosystem, reaching more shoppers, driving incremental trips and larger baskets for retailers and generating incremental sales for the CPGs being promoted.

How Consumer Choice Leads to Incremental Sales

Today’s consumers are increasingly value-focused and digitally engaged. They expect advertisers to reach them with relevant savings and retailers to provide them with seamless cross-platform experiences. To support these emerging consumer preferences, Quotient believes in giving shoppers choice in how they want to experience and redeem value—either in the form of immediate savings at the register or through rewards. Quotient’s solution supports both coupons and rebates with no minimum thresholds for payout.

“Consumers respond to relevant experiences,” Lellouche said. “We make it easy for the retailer to give their shoppers personalization, convenience and choice about how they save, and that’s going to result in more store trips and incremental sales.”

Helping to ensure these retailer and brand goals are met, Quotient’s integrated coupon and rebates solution includes technology to prevent abuses such as stacking and fraud, which would otherwise undermine brand incrementality. These protections let the promotion work as intended—encouraging the consumer to save today but come back and buy the next product at full price.

Additionally, when a coupon and a rebate exist for the same product, serving both might cause confusion by falsely implying that both can be redeemed. Quotient’s technology can cleverly serve one or the other depending on the campaign’s goals and the customer’s preference, streamlining the savings process in a personalized way.

“We can flex coupons or rebates to best suit the campaign and create strong relationships with customers through ease of use and autonomy,” Lellouche said. “These features are essential for driving results through incremental sales.”

Achieving Scale with a Full-Network Approach

Scale ranks as one of the most critical factors for ensuring that a promotions campaign rewards the brand’s investment. After all, marketing is about reaching and engaging as much of your target audience as possible. In 2022 alone, Quotient’s unique approach resulted in delivering consumer savings of $11.2 billion—a staggering total that is reflective of both the scale and effectiveness of our full-network solution that allows savings to be tailored to each consumer.

Omnichannel marketing strategies leverage data and technology to engage consumers throughout the path to purchase—whether they’re browsing social media at home, searching online for savings, using Quotient’s direct-to-consumer Shopmium app, traveling outside of the home or shopping at the point of purchase in a physical store.

Optimizing Promotions Through Advanced Measurement

Consistent measurement is crucial for brands and advertisers to evaluate the performance of live campaigns and optimize for future ones. Quotient Analytics offers on-demand access to campaign reporting with metrics segmented by marketing channel, audience, creative or sub-brand. With our closed-loop promotions measurement solution, users can track key insights such as incremental sales and purchase drivers.

Measurement can also reveal which sales are attributable to each channel in an omnichannel campaign. In 2022, Quotient announced the addition of promotions into its omnichannel measurement capabilities, allowing marketers to holistically measure the efficiency and return of their digital promotions alongside media channels such as programmatic display and digital out-of-home.

Are you ready to take advantage of the power of digital promotions in your performance-based marketing? Contact us at hello@quotient.com today.