Promotions and Campaigns

Promotions are the main means for your online marketing activities and can help you to draw customers to your site and increase sales. Generally, promotions define some sort of discount or benefit and determine a target group to which the discount should be made available.

You may furthermore restrict access to promotions by distributing promotion codes (in the form of coupons) amongst your target audience. Customers then need to provide the promotion code in order to prove that they are entitled to the promotion.

Another feature of promotions is that they can be associated with content components via content relations. Hence, promotions constitute an instrument for content personalization. Creating promotions that specify only target groups and associated content components (i.e., promotions without discounts) enables shop operators to publish target-group-specific content.

Campaigns provide a means to combine multiple promotions. In addition, marketing managers can assign dedicated CMS page variants or components to campaigns as well as define specific target groups and validity periods for campaigns.

The following terms and concepts are essential with respect to promotion management:

• General Promotion Details

  General promotion details include the promotion name, an ID, a description, settings on how a promotion can be combined with other promotions, the activation period, and budget details. For details, see Manually Creating Promotions.

• Promotion Ranking

  Since Intershop Commerce Management permits you to run multiple promotions at the same time, it may happen that several valid promotions apply to one basket. To define the calculation order of the promotions, marketing administrators can define a rank for each promotion. As a result, the promotion with the highest rank is calculated first. For details, see Manually Creating Promotions.

• Promotion Target Group

  The target group of a promotion can be a special customer segment (e.g., all first-time shoppers, or all recurring customers) or customers individually selected from the pool of users registered with the channel. Promotions can also be targeted at customers that are associated with affiliate partners or affiliate partner programs.

  Note: In order to be able to assign customer segments as a target group, at least one segmentation service must be configured for the sales channel, see Customer Segments.

  For details, see Defining Promotion Targets.

• Discount Rule, Promotion Condition, Promotion Discount

  For each promotion you can define one or more discount rules. Each discount rule itself defines one or more conditions and a discount.

  Multiple conditions can be combined by the logical operators AND and OR to form a single expression. This expression evaluates to either True or False. If the conditional part of the rule is True, then the promotion is applied and the customer will get the discount defined by the rule.

  For example, you could create a discount rule that says trigger the promotion when the customer places at least five items in the basket or spends more than 100 USD on a single item from a specific product category. If these conditions are met, apply a 10% financial discount.

  Thus, you can create very powerful discount rules allowing you to model even the most complex marketing strategy in a very flexible way.

  For details, see Defining Discount Rules.

• Promotion Codes

  Promotion Codes provide an additional means to propagate the promotion to the target group. For example, promotion codes could be distributed amongst the target audience via newspaper, radio, or TV advertisements. Customers who want to benefit from the promotion will need to enter the promotion code during the order checkout process.

  For details, see Managing Promotion Codes.

• Dynamic Basket Message

  For each discount rule you can set up an individual dynamic message that will be displayed when the promotion has not been triggered yet but is close to being triggered. Using this feature, you could for example display a message on the basket page saying "Add 2 more items to your basket to receive free shipping!".

  The threshold that triggers the displaying of the dynamic message is configurable for each promotion independently. For details, see Configuring a Dynamic Basket Message.

• Promotion Messaging

  Promotion messaging contains an icon and various texts that will appear in the context of promoted products, e.g., on catalog or product detail pages. The default configuration is to display an icon, a short title and a long title component along with a details link on product details pages. When the storefront user clicks the details link, an overlay pop-up opens comprising a long title, descriptive text, and legal disclaimer text. For details, see Configuring Promotion Messaging.

• Content Relations

  You can set up content relations that associate the promotion with specific CMS-based page variants or components, see Managing Content Relations for Promotions.

• General Promotion Preferences

  Promotion preferences that apply to all promotions in a given sales channel include promotion budget sources, promotion type priorities and the validity expiration behavior.

  • A budget source is like a tag you can use to categorize a promotion's budget. You may, for example, define a budget source for promotions aimed at partners, and another one set up for employees. Currently the budget source has no further effect on the promotion or its budget.

  • The promotion type priority specifies in which order various promotion types are to be applied when calculating discounts. The priorities set for the sales channel can be overridden by promotion-specific settings.

  • The validity behavior setting specifies whether a promotion is still applicable for a running session even after the time or the budget has expired.

  For details about setting general promotion preferences, see Managing Promotion Preferences at Channel Level.

Further available concepts on this topic can be found here: