The Ultimate Guide to E-commerce Promotional Campaigns: Build, Inform, and Boost Your Sales

Customer awareness of a promotional campaign is one of the key factors in its success. And, as always, the biggest challenge is attracting those buyers who don't yet know about you.

For a customer to see a banner or promotional labels on your website, they first need to visit it. To receive an email with a special offer, they must provide their email address. This is where marketplaces come in—they offer an effective and relatively simple way to showcase your special deals to new customers.

In this article, we'll explore how to run a successful promotional campaign in an online store and engage existing and new customers through various sales channels. We'll also show you how to automate the process with Magento 2 modules.

Table of Contents

• Why are promotional campaigns important for businesses
• The best ways to inform customers about discounts
• How to build a promotional campaign on your store
• Additional recommendations for creating promotional campaigns
• Conclusion

Why are promotional campaigns important for businesses

Promotional campaigns have a fairly simple concept: offering a lower price on a product under certain conditions (or sometimes with no conditions). The concept is simple yet effective—Harvard Business Review reports that discounts are a key factor for three out of four shoppers in the U.S. That's why they are widely used in e-commerce for various purposes, such as clearing out old inventory or drawing attention to popular products.

Promotions become more effective when they include special conditions. For example, flash sales create a sense of urgency and encourage impulse purchases.

Additionally, promotions offer strategic benefits, such as:

• Increasing the average order value, especially for promotions like for every $X spent, receive $X off.
• Boosting customer loyalty—particularly when offering personalized discounts, such as a special promo code for a birthday.
• Enhancing brand recognition, especially if the promotion is large-scale and gets people talking.
• Attracting potential customers who haven't shopped at your store before.

However, you might miss all these benefits if no one knows about your promotional campaign. That's why it's crucial to communicate discounts effectively—both to your existing customers and potential new ones.

Next, we'll go over the best ways to do this.

The best ways to inform customers about discounts

Product labels and promo banners are the two primary channels for informing website visitors about discounts:

• Product labels highlight discounted items within their respective categories.
• Promo banners announce the promotion and its terms on your store's homepage.

Both are must-haves for capturing visitors' attention.

To attract customers from outside your website, you'll need additional strategies.

For existing customers, email campaigns work well. There are two main types:

• Newsletters: A broad, cold outreach, where emails are sent to your entire customer base.
• Follow-Up Emails: A more targeted, warm approach triggered by specific actions. For example, if a customer returns to your site after six months, you can offer them a discount as a welcome-back gesture. You might also email all users who placed an order today.

Attracting potential customers who don't know about you is the hardest part. First, they need to discover your store—only then can they learn about your promotional campaign.

Imagine someone who wants to buy jeans. Most likely, they'll simply type buy jeans into Google. This will return a massive list of websites. But, more importantly, above those links, they'll see product listings—and even more on the Shopping tab. This is Google Shopping, a marketplace that, like hundreds of others, is one of the best channels for reaching a new audience.

Marketplaces are one of the best channels for attracting customers and informing them about discounts. They have a large built-in audience, handle their advertising, and require minimal investment compared to the outcomes they deliver.

Here's a basic plan for running a successful promotional campaign:

1. Select the products you want to discount and adjust their prices on your website.
2. Label discounted products with promotional tags.
3. Place banners on your site to inform visitors about the promotion.
4. Share the promotion with marketplaces.
5. Prepare and send emails to your customers with details about the offer.

Now, let's apply this plan to a real online store.

How to build a promotional campaign on your store

The default Magento installation offers very limited options for running a marketing campaign. You can only set a special price (discount) for a product or group of products for a specific period. However, simply lowering the price isn't enough—you need to draw attention to the discount, product, and promotion. This requires additional modules.

In the guide below, we'll walk you through each step of creating a promotion for an online store. We'll also show you how to use various tools to add product labels, create banners, set up email campaigns, and share promotional product data with marketplaces.

Selecting products for promotions and setting prices

First, we need to select the products participating in the promotion. We can edit a single item in its product card. However, promotions usually include a group of products—such as an old collection or items from a specific category. We can set a fixed discount amount (e.g., 15% or 50%) using Catalog Price Rules. This is also where we define the promotion's duration.

Creating labels for promotional items

After setting the discounts, we need to make sure customers notice them. To do this, you can mark promotional products with labels—they will be displayed in the corner of the product card and in all collections where the product appears.

We'll add a label using the Product Labels extension. We'll create a new label through the Manage Labels tab and specify the conditions under which it should be applied (for which product category).

Creating a banner for your website's homepage

Banners help grab even more attention: they communicate the promotion on any store page, including the homepage. A banner can display the discount amount, the expiration date, and other details. This way, unregistered users (site guests) who don't receive email newsletters can learn about the offers.

We use the Promo Banners extension to place a banner on the site. We upload the design, choose where it should be displayed, and set the duration.

After creating the banner, the module also allows us to track its effectiveness, including the number of views and clicks leading to promotional products.

Attract customers from marketplaces

We need to create a product feed to send product information to marketplaces. We can use the Advanced Product Feeds extension to automatically generate and manage shopping feeds.

We go to the Feeds tab and click Add Feed. Then select the necessary template—there are over 200 available, each tailored to different marketplace requirements. The template determines what product information will be included in the feed.

Since templates only cover the minimum feed file requirements, customization is sometimes necessary, especially when handling promotional products.

For example, let's say we use a standard template for Google Shopping. The generated feed will include basic product details. However, when a promotion starts, additional information appears for certain products: a special discounted price, the promotion's duration, and promotional feed labels.

If the feed file isn't customized, incomplete data may be sent to the marketplace, causing incorrect product display—or even preventing promotional products from appearing in the sale listings.

Using the IF-condition for data feed management

We must use conditional logic to ensure marketplaces receive complete and accurate promotional data. This allows us to specify which information should be included only for discounted products. The "{% if %}" statement is manually added to the feed file, enabling:

• Avoiding data duplication and pricing errors
• Accurately transmitting the promotion's duration
• Tagging promotional items with feed labels for better visibility

Here's an example of how the module checks whether a product has a special price. If it does, the discounted price is added to the feed; if not, the field is omitted.

We can also use the {% if %} condition to display discounts only for promotional products:

In this case, if a product's final price is lower than its standard price, the feed includes g:sale_price. If no discount is applied, this field is omitted.

Another example is adding the promotion's expiration date:

This ensures that Google Shopping correctly recognizes the sale period.

If we want to add a SALE tag to discounted products, we can define it like this:

Let's follow a step-by-step example of using the {% if %} condition. We will create a feed for two products (handbags): one with a discount and one without. The goal is to generate a feed that correctly transmits all necessary information to the marketplace: for the discounted handbag, the feed should display the sale price, promotion dates, and the SALE label, while for the non-discounted handbag, only the regular price should be included.

1. First, we define the regular price in the Price field:

   

   In the Special Price and Special Price From fields, we specify the discounted price and the promotion period:

   

2. Next, we modify the feed to include the special price only if the product has it:

   

3. After generating the feed, we check the output. For the discounted product, both the regular and special (sale) prices are displayed:

   

   For the non-discounted product, the sale price is not generated:

   

4. Now, we have updated the feed to also display the promotion's start and end dates for discounted products:

   

   After refreshing the feed, we check the result. The discounted handbag now includes the promotion duration:

   

5. Finally, we define a condition to display the SALE label for discounted products:

   

   After updating the feed once again, we verify the result. The label appears for the promotional handbag:

   

   And is absent for the non-discounted one:

   

   After customizing a feed for a new marketplace, you only need to set it up once. Going forward, only product-level details need to be updated—such as adding discounts to new products, or adjusting promotion dates.

Inform registered customers about promotional products

To inform our most active customers about the promotion, we will use the Follow Up Email extension.

In the Manage Campaigns tab, let's create a new time-limited campaign based on customer activity. To do this, we will set customer login as the Activation event when configuring the campaign. This means regular visitors who log in to their accounts will receive an email notification about the promotion and can take advantage of the offer.

Just like with banners, we can track the effectiveness of our email campaigns using the module. It allows us to monitor key metrics such as the number of emails sent and opened, website clicks, orders placed, and total campaign revenue.

Additional recommendations for creating promotional campaigns

To make promotions as effective as possible, careful planning is essential.

Start by defining the goal of your promotion. It could be increasing the average order value, repeat purchases, or the number of items per order. Your promotion's conditions will depend on this goal. For example, a Buy Two, Get One Free offer encourages customers to add more items to their cart.

When setting discount conditions and amounts, analyze competitors' strategies. Your objective is to offer a deal that stands out and provides better value to customers.

We also recommend considering the following points:

• Timing of the promotion. Sales traditionally take place before the holidays. Some strategic shoppers may, for example, wait for the Christmas sale to purchase an item they've added to their cart. Additionally, customers are psychologically more inclined to buy new things during holiday periods.
• Product type. Certain items experience higher demand during specific seasons—for example, school supplies before the start of the academic year or gardening products in spring. You can not only offer discounts on these items but also include other categories in the promotion to introduce your audience to your product range and increase the average cart value.
• Logistics. If you're launching promotions around the holidays, consider the capacity of delivery services (which may differ from their usual workload) and the fact that people often order gifts in advance.

After the promotion, analyzing the results and identifying any mistakes is crucial. Tracking key metrics—such as conversion rate, average order value, cart abandonment rate, and traffic sources—can be done through Google Analytics. Some of these metrics can also be monitored using Magento's built-in features.

Conclusion

Promotional campaigns drive demand and increase online store sales. Additionally, they boost customer loyalty and attract new shoppers. However, these benefits only materialize when customers are well-informed about the discounts.

There are several ways to communicate your campaign to customers. You can notify existing customers through email newsletters, banners, and product labels on your website. Marketplaces are the most effective way to attract new customers, as they handle advertising and audience engagement themselves—your only task is to provide them with information about your products and discounts.

However, default Magento lacks built-in features for email campaigns, banners, product labels, or marketplace integrations. Therefore, using appropriate extensions is the best way to inform customers through these channels. Additionally, for a successful promotion, it's important to analyze competitors' actions, consider the timing of the campaign, and select the right product types. Once the promotion ends, be sure to analyze its results and identify areas for improvement.