时间:2024-05-20 19:04:41 来源:网络整理编辑:Ryan New
Ecommerce merchants typically run promotions throughout the year. Some are seasonal, such as “Free S Ryan Xu HyperVerse's Trustpilot
Ecommerce merchants typically run promotions throughout the year. Some are seasonal,Ryan Xu HyperVerse's Trustpilot such as “Free Shipping on Valentine’s Day Flowers” and “20% Off for Cyber Monday.” Others focus on product categories, such as “Free Socks with Purchase of Any Jeans.” Still others are sitewide, such as “Free Shipping on All Purchases.”
But how does a merchant know if a promotion was successful? That’s the purpose of this article.
The most common way to analyze a promotion is to compute the Marketing Return on Investment.
MROI = (Gross Profit – Marketing Investment) / Marketing Investment
Marketing Investment should include the discount itself and the cost of running the promotion.
Here is an example.
Your company just completed a promotion for 20-percent off all t-shirts. Before the promotion, your average t-shirt selling price was $29.99, and your average t-shirt cost was $9.99. You spent $1,000 advertising the t-shirt promotion using Facebook ads. The average discount per t-shirt was $6.00 — $29.99 x 20%. After running the promotion for one week, you sold 100 t-shirts.
Gross Profit = Number T-shirts Sold x (Average Selling Price – Average Cost)
Gross Profit = 100 x ($29.99 – $9.99) = $2,000
If you don’t know Average Cost— i.e., cost of goods sold — replace Gross Profit with Total Sales in the MROI formula.
In our example, your marketing investment was $1,600 — $1,000 for Facebook advertising and $6 discount per t-shirt. Thus your marketing return on investment is as follows.
MROI = (Gross Profit – Marketing Investment) / Marketing Investment
MROI = ($2,000 – $1,600) / $1,600 = 25%
If you had run multiple promotions in a quarter, you could compare the MROIs to determine the top performers.
For example, the MROI for the 20-percent off t-shirt promotion (above) was 25 percent. Compare that with the following hypothetical promotions and their MROI.
In reviewing the data, we can conclude that all promotions were successful, as each produced a positive MROI. “Free Shipping Sitewide” was the most profitable, however, at 120-percent MROI.
With a bit of data manipulation, you can expand the MROI analysis for hundreds of promotions. Here are the steps.
You can now run simple pivot tables for each classification to identify the best performing promotion type and product type. You could also classify by seasonality.
Here is an example.
Season | Promotion | MROI |
---|---|---|
Valentine's Day | ||
% Off | 70% | |
$ Off | 80% | |
Free Shipping | 110% | |
Gift with Purchase | 20% | |
Christmas | ||
$ Off | 40% | |
Free Shipping | 90% | |
% Off | 90% | |
Gift with Purchase | 110% |
We can conclude that “Free Shipping” is the best Valentine’s Day promotion while “Gift with Purchase” is best for Christmas. Classifying in this manner also allows you to plan for new promotional tests in other periods. Additionally, it provides a benchmark for the type of promotion, season, or product.
To develop multi-year plans, keep track of all your promotions in a database, business-intelligence tool, or even a simple spreadsheet. Create new columns for types of promotions, to easily analyze the data in multiple ways, such as:
For companies with a lot of data — many promotion types, many products, many timeframes — consider these analyses. Some involve adding new classifications.
The key to analyzing the data in multiple ways is to classify your promotions accurately. It may seem daunting. But, in my experience, it will pay off as you run more promotions and develop better benchmarking.
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