10 Promotions

Learn about promotions, including their types, criteria, events, benefits, and how to create and manage them.

Promotions Overview

Use this topic to understand what promotions are and how you create and manage them.

About Promotions

Promotions complement Product Offers and are created to provide additional awards, discounts, or reductions to a customer who meets pre-defined criteria. Promotions are usually designed for a limited period relative to a product offering, for seasonal events or to incentivize prospects and subscribers to sign up for cross-bundle benefits. For example, an end-of-season sale or a stock clearance sale.

Promotions are often applied when the customer buys product offerings with a price or amount exceeding a certain limit. Typical examples are a buy-one-get-one-free offer or $10 off a purchase of $100. Promotions are always provided based on pre-defined criteria. As a product administrator, you can define the criteria and as a product manager you can configure , retire, and obsolete the promotion. You can view and change an event's priority before confirming the promotion entity.

Types of Promotions

Launch enables Award, Discount, and Reduction promotions.
  • Award: Usually a gift or an allowance. For example, a USB disk or 100GB is given to the customer for free.
  • Discount: Usually a discount on the price of the offering. For example, for every 10 quantities of a product offering that a customer buys, the customer gets 10% off on qualifying products. Another example is, if a customer buys 2 shirts, the customer gets 100 rupees off on each shirt.

For packages, discounts can be aggregate or mutually exclusive and are applied by setting the event priorities. The first discount on an event list takes priority over those below it.

Mutually exclusive discounts via promotion

You can set discounts to be mutually exclusive when you purchase a bundle of items.

For example, percentage discount events are defined for a bundle named Supremo Prime Promo.

  • Event 1 – Supremo Prime Plan + Device: get 20% off on the device.

  • Event 2 - Supremo Prime only for locations in 101 and 103: get 10% off on Prime.

If customers purchase Supremo Prime Plan and the device then they get a 20% off on the device. They do not also get the location-based benefit, even if they are from locations 101 or 103, as the events are mutually exclusive. If a customer purchases only Supremo Prime from location 101, they get 10% off on prime.

Aggregate discounts via promotions

Specify a bundle of items and the discount that applies to specific items if the user buys the entire bundle.

For example, if the customers buy a device with a plan then they get 10% off on the device.

How are criteria parameters obtained?

Criteria parameters come from Custom Profile Specifications. As a product administrator, you configure these attributes through REST APIs and configure the parameters to participate in the conditions where they are used during the creation of a promotion. For example, the attributes could be:

  • Customer ID
  • Birthday
  • Customer Level
  • Offering ID
  • Category ID
  • Quantity
  • Amount

Events and Benefits

Events define the situations or triggers under which a promotion is evaluated.

Events

You can add multiple events to a promotion. An example of an event is Buy 2 and Get 1 free or the customer's birthday. Additionally, while evaluating a promotion, events are always individually evaluated. For example, when a promotion is evaluated, all of its events are evaluated individually, if it is configured that way.

You can configure multiple promotion events in priority order in an event list. The discount event on the top takes priority over those below it. The default priority is overridden if you define a conditional sequence for the event list.

The conditional sequence of events you define determines the evaluation order of the promotion events. Each sequence contains the following:

  • Sequence Number - Specifies the order of the sequence evaluation and can only be specified using the Launch REST API. In the user interface, you can drag and position the sequence definitions in the required order.
  • Name - Name of the promotion sequence.
  • Next promotion Event if used - Specify the next promotion event to apply if the current promotion event is applied.
  • Next promotion Event if not used - Specify the next promotion event to apply if the current promotion event is not applied.

You can add conditional sequences of events to achieve aggregate discounts and mutually exclusive discounts. For example, consider that you have 3 offers: an internet plan, a mobile plan, and a device. You can create two events, event1 has a mobile and internet subscription with a discount of 20% and event2 has a discount of 10% off the internet plan subscription if the subscriber is from a particular location. At run time, event1 is analyzed and if the customer purchased internet and mobile subscriptions, then a 20% discount is applied and the sequence exits. Otherwise, it moves to promotion event2. If the customer has internet subscription and is from the specified location, then a 10% discount applies. Otherwise the sequence exits without applying any discounts.

Criterion and Criteria Group

Creating an event requires that you must set the criteria for each event. The logical relationship between different groups is decided by the relationTypeInGroup. A vital element of setting up criteria is defining the criteria group conditions.

The two conditions that you can choose for your criteria groups are AND or OR, which will be applicable to the multiple criteria in each criteria group. While creating an individual criterion parameter within a criteria group, you can also choose from AND or OR.

Benefits

Based on the promotion type that you choose, the benefits that you can provide to a customer may differ. Here's a table that describes the promotion type and the associated benefit options.

Table 10-1 Promotion Type and Benefits

Promotion Type Criteria Benefit Type Example

Award (External Benefit)

Customer reaches a certain criteria, for example, either by spending a certain specified amount or by buying a certain quantity of a product or products.

Award, Allowance

Example: Buy N items or more and get n items for free on qualifying products.

  • Award: A physical gift, such as a mobile.

  • Allowance: Additional GB or MB.

Discount (Percentage Discount)

Customer reaches a certain criteria, for example, either by spending a certain specified amount or by buying a certain quantity of a product or products.

Discount

Example: Buy n items or more, and get up to 25% off on qualifying products.

Discount

  • Buy $200 or more, and 5% off on purchase of qualifying products.

  • For every 5 pairs of socks purchased, save 20%.

The execution of promotion is the responsibility of e-commerce platform which has to apply the promotion type (award or discount) based on the information retrieved from promotion API.

Promotions and Price List

As a product manager, you can associate or disassociate promotions with a price list. You can view the promotions in a price list and also publish the price list with promotions to spoke systems.

Here's an example of a price list and its associated promotions.

Table 10-2 Price List and Promotions

Price List Promotions

US Price List

  • Buy $100 and get 5% off on a qualifying product.

  • Buy 3 handsets and get a 10% discount.

Cross-Product Discounts

Use cross-product discounts to model aggregate discounts or mutually exclusive discounts similar to Siebel's aggregate discount on promotional offers.

Create a Promotion

To create a promotion:

  1. Click on Promotions, and then click Create Promotion. The New Promotion page appears.

  2. On the New Promotions page, provide the identifying information such as name and description.
  3. Specify the effective period for the promotion.
  4. In the Other information section, specify the following:
    • Initiative the promotion is associated with
    • Promotion Type
    • Price List
    • Promotion profile specification

  5. Click Continue to Events to enter the name, priority, and the description of the event.

    Note:

    The order of the events in the final events list determines the priority of the event and the order in which the discounts or markups are applied. You can move an event up or down in an event list based on its relative priority.

  6. In the Criteria section, click Add Criteria Group.

  7. Specify the AND or OR parameter for the criteria groups that you create.

    Note:

    For all the criteria groups that you create, the parameter that you select will be applicable across the criteria groups.

  8. Add the criteria group name.

  9. Specify the parameter AND or OR, to say whether any of the criteria or all the criteria must be met.

  10. Select the criteria parameter, the operator, and the criteria value depending on the criteria parameter that you have selected.

  11. In the Benefits section, click Add Promotion Benefit.

  12. Specify the details including the action type, value, and object.

  13. Click Add Event.

  14. Click Add Promotion Event if you want to add another promotion event.

  15. Click Create.

    You can now see your promotion in the list of promotions on the Promotions page.