Targeting Content for Promotions

This section describes the various ways to target content for promotions. There are different methods for targeting content. You can:

Scenarios

Scenarios can update or track user profiles and offer promotions. Store pages can include slots dedicated to DSS-based promotions. A DSS scenario is set up to watch for the following types of conditions or events:

The scenario responds by performing any of the following actions:

In the Pioneer Cycling store, the store home page and the shopping cart page display promotional information. For example, the store offers a 10% discount to new members.

You may want to push specific products in specific locations on your site. For example, in the Pioneer Cycling store, we chose to highlight a particular type of bike jersey for a period of time on the clothing page.

The Pioneer Cycling store highlights various products. For example, a specific bike is highlighted on the Mountain Bikes category page. Or, particular helmets and water bottle cages are featured on each bicycle product page in the “Related Products” section. For more information, see Appendix A, Pioneer Cycling Scenarios.

Highlighting products and content

You can create and manage a list of specified products to recommend to all customers or a group of specifically targeted customers. You can assign a discount to products on the list. Examples of promotional lists are a list of the top ten products or a list of award-winning products. We did not implement any promotional lists in Pioneer Cycling, but you could do this in the following manner:

  1. Create a new category or categories in your store to hold these special product lists. For example: “Store -> Special -> Award Winning Products”. One of the advantages of ATG Consumer Commerce’s flexible category system is that products may be located in many different areas of the store.

  2. Include the special products by adding them to the new category’s fixedChildProducts attribute.

  3. Create a global promotion that discounts this category. Set its attribute "Automatically give to all customers" = "true" to make it global. Then set its discount rule to "Always discount items in category Award Winning Products". Now, these items are discounted, regardless of whether the customer views them in the special category or their original category.

  4. Deliver some media to the customer to announce your new category, or simply place a link to the category somewhere noticeable.

Cross-selling

ATG Consumer Commerce offers cross-selling features. Cross-selling promotes an add-on or accessory product or service that, when combined with the primary product, makes a better or complete solution. Business managers can use the commerce repository editor to identify products that are related (for example, a jersey and some matching gloves) and have the catalog display a set of links to those products.

In the Pioneer Cycling site, cross-selling is accomplished by a related accessory list on a product page. Each product has a list of related products. These products are chosen by a merchandiser, and placed into the fixedRelatedProducts attribute. These related products are shown on a product template, with links to more product information. A Get It button is also created that allows the customer to add that product to the cart from that page. For example, in the following screenshot, a helmet and a water bottle cage are shown on the page of a specific bike. The customer could add the helmet to her cart directly from this page rather than having to go to the product page of the helmet.

Cross-selling a helmet and water bottle cage with a bike.

Upselling

The key to upselling is to promote a more powerful or higher-level product than the one the customer is considering. It is key to portray both the current product and the promoted product as desirable for the customer.

We didn’t specifically implement any upselling in Pioneer Cycling but you could easily do it in your web application. The concept of upselling is to sell products of higher quality or better price to customers. For example, if a customer looks at $1500 bike, we could also show a $2000 bike under Related Products on that product page. We could add the text, “Bike X has the same safety and styling features as Bike Y, plus the added features of a specially designed comfort seat and a titanium frame.”

This sort of upselling is accomplished with the same functionality as cross selling: using the fixedRelatedProducts attribute.

You could also use a scenario to upsell products. For example, you could create a scenario that watches for orders that contain an expensive bike frame, but economy tires. The scenario could offer an incentive for a better set of tires, and perhaps a small discount. This scenario could potentially only be targeted at customers who prefer more expensive products.

 
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