Online promotion monitoring – save your time thanks to automation
- 29 July 2020
Promotions are one of the most important mechanisms for attracting customers. Their effective monitoring allows you to understand the strategies of your competition and properly plan your promotional calendar. Unfortunately, tracking offers manually on dozens or hundreds of websites often means many hours of work for Key Account Managers and marketers.
According to the HubSpot report, in 2019 as many as 19% of salespeople spent over 60 minutes a day entering data into the company’s database. It is as much as 2.5 days of work of one salesperson who could spend this time on activities that are more crucial for business development – such as preparing offers or contact with the customer. However, there is a way to improve this result – introduce automation of promotion monitoring.
Effective promotion monitoring
During the cooperation with the marketing department of an FMCG producer, I found out that promotion monitoring is one of the biggest challenges for the sales team. Key Account Managers were responsible for regularly monitoring nearly a hundred products in over a dozen retail chains and marketplaces. Every week, they spent many hours browsing supermarket websites and manually entering promotional prices into company reports. Moreover, a lot of relevant information about promotions came to them accidentally based on random observations of the sales reps or colleagues during their private purchases.
Promotion monitoring – automation
Such market monitoring not only requires a large amount of human work but above all is ineffective. For example, manual monitoring will never provide us with full information about the time and frequency of displaying the banner on the stores’ websites. It is also difficult to analyze non-standard promotions such as cross-selling or multipack.
One of the solutions to this problem is the automation of promotion monitoring, which frees up valuable time of salespeople and allows them to use the resources in sales and marketing departments better. We wrote more about how the promotion monitoring works in this article.
Types of promo monitoring
Promotion monitoring tools can comprehensively report various types of promotional mechanisms, such as promotions:
- On the product card, i.e. communicated directly on the product page in the form of icons, banners, or pop-ups. The tool detects and reports various mechanisms, such as discounts, installments, freebies, or free delivery.
- In a given store or sales channel, i.e. banners on the home page and product subpages. The tool lists texts and graphic creations from them with their exact place in the rotator and the time and frequency of display, and also includes the discount values in the report.
- Outside the sales channel, i.e. coupons with an indication of the places where they were communicated (the tool analyzes promotion aggregators).
- Cart-level– some types of promotions, such as discounts after entering a code, freebies, cross-sells, or free delivery, are visible only from the cart level. The tool records them and presents the final sale price along with the history of its changes.
- Promotional newsletters – using special algorithms it is also possible to extract prices from supermarkets published on the web and present them in the form of a readable report.
Such comprehensive monitoring gives the most complete picture of competitors’ strategies and allows you to effectively manage you promotions and working time of sales departments.
Automation of promotion monitoring – advantages
Automation of promotion monitoring is:
- significant time savings for sellers
Thanks to its implementation, your salespeople will not have to spend hours weekly on manually searching for information and preparing reports. Instead, they will be able to spend this time preparing offers, contacting the client, or improving sales skills, leading to better sales results. - all data in one place
Information on promotions will be downloaded from all offline and online stores and marketplaces and collected in one intuitive tool in the form of a transparent and ready-to-use report that can be used simultaneously by several departments. - greater accuracy and correctness of data
The automation tool enables detailed monitoring of selected products, market segments, specific sellers, and types of promotions.
In the case of the aforementioned company, the introduction of automatic promotion monitoring allowed us to save more than 50 hours a month in the 12-person sales department and over 30 hours in the seven-person marketing department. You can supplement this with a free calendar to design your schedules and keep your team even more productive. Also, the scope and accuracy of the obtained data increased significantly, which we could analyze not only in relation to our own observations but also to other market data, e.g. Nielsen sales reports.
Implementing a similar solution in your company can bring you measurable savings and much more effective management of your promotions.