Promotional marketing types, strategies & examples for 2024

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Promotional marketing will continue to evolve in 2024 to keep up with new technologies, client habits, and market trends. Ecommerce businesses must understand promotional marketing strategies and how they work to effectively utilize them to capture attention and brand loyalty among their target audience. 

This guide thoroughly reviews promotional marketing and shows real-world examples of campaigns that can inspire you. We’ll discuss channels like email, affiliate, social media, and influencer marketing, so you can learn how to get started and utilize these in your omnichannel approach. For you to see how it’s actually done, we’ll also give real examples of how top brands in different industries used these marketing strategies to reach their target audiences and grow their businesses, as well as how you can do so.

What is promotional marketing?

Promotional marketing is a group of activities that create awareness about a brand, product, or service. Effective promotional marketing captures people’s attention and entices them to take action, whether it’s making a purchase, attending an event, or engaging with a brand.

The goal is to create a sense of urgency and exclusivity. You want to make people feel like they’re missing out on something special if they don’t take advantage of the promotion. It strives to create a strong emotional connection with the audience and build brand loyalty. You can achieve this with:

• Attention-grabbing visuals
• Creative storytelling
• Interactive engagements

The ecommerce marketplace is expanding and only becoming more and more competitive. Creating memorable and creative promotional marketing content will help you stand out among the masses. You can use promotional marketing to:

• Promote a new product
• Grow your brand awareness
• Create interest in your products
• Boost sales
• Increase brand engagement
• Highlight unique selling points

By focusing on promotional advertising, you can grow your business and turn potential customers into long-term repeat customers.

Types of promotional marketing

There are a lot of promotional strategies and activities ecommerce businesses can use. Here are some of the most popular types of promotion in marketing:

• Advertising: This is a classic form of marketing. It involves grabbing the attention of the public through TV, radio, print, and web advertisements. It’s a means of communication to promote your product/service to attract interest and engagement (and ultimately sales). The primary goal of advertising is to reach a large audience and raise brand awareness.

• Direct marketing: This strategy includes personally contacting possible customers through mail pieces, email, or text messages. Sending personalized ads and messages straight to your target audience makes the relationship feel more personal. 

• Sales promotions: These are short-term rewards meant to get people to buy right away. Sales promotions are a great way to boost short-term sales and get rid of stock quickly. Examples include:
  • Discounts
  • Giveaways
  • Flash sales
  • “Buy one, get one free” deals

• Events and experiences: Ecommerce businesses can make unique experiences and connect directly with their audience by planning or sponsoring events, whether they happen in real life or online. Events can include:
  • Trade shows
  • Workshops
  • Product launches

• Loyalty programs: These programs give points, savings, or special perks to customers who buy from them again and again. By giving incentives, loyalty programs help build long-term ties with customers and get them to buy from you again. Some examples are:
  • Membership perks
  • Reward cards
  • Frequent flyer miles

• Partnerships and collaborations: Working with other companies or influential people can help you reach more people and get your brand in front of new ones. Partnerships come in many forms, such as co-branded products, events put on together, or endorsements from influential people.

By combining these activities, businesses can communicate their unique qualities, differentiate themselves from competitors, and attract new customers while keeping existing ones. This helps to grow its brand and revenue.

6 main promotional marketing strategies

Understanding different promotional marketing channels can help you get the attention of the people you want to reach. People who might become buyers can be interested and encouraged to act. Let’s look at six strategies you can leverage to reach your goals.

1. Email marketing

Email marketing remains a strong strategy for connecting with your customers, keeping leads engaged, and turning relationships into sales. Make a targeted email list of people who want to hear from you, and then send them personalized, useful material.

Your messaging doesn’t have to always be ‘Hey, you left some items at the checkout.’ It could be a notification saying, ‘Get ready for our biggest sale yet, keep an eye on our website to be the first to see…’ While it doesn’t directly encourage them to purchase, it at least gets them onto the website and see what’s on offer.

Some of the email marketing promotions include:

• Sales announcements
• Promotional offers
• Renewal reminders
• New product notifications

Get inspired by emails from other brands, like this one about pre-orders. It aims to make the process as smooth as possible for buyers by providing steps they should complete in advance. 

A platform like Omnisend lets you get the most out of your email marketing. You can create engaging and highly targeted emails with tools like pre-designed email templates, segmentation, personalization, automation, and more. 

Kerrits, a well-known equestrian clothing brand, successfully used Omnisend’s features. Four months after making the switch, Kerrits achieved a significant increase in revenue-per-email (RPE) of its promotional campaigns. 

Kerrits’ standard promotional emails generate a 26% open rate, a 19% click-to-open rate, and a 5.6% conversion rate. Their automated emails generate an average open rate of 44%, a click-to-open rate of 23%, and a conversion rate of 21.7%. This resulted in a 50% increase in revenue per email.

Follow these tips to get started with email marketing:

• Write the best subject line, offer lead magnets, optimize your website email capture, and make it easy for people to opt into your email list to build an active one
• Divide your list into groups based on customers’ behavior, likes, and past purchases to create personalized and targeted ads
• Use responsive styles and buttons that can be tapped to make your emails work best on mobile devices
• To get people to trust and believe in your business, use user-generated content and social proof, like photos and reviews from past customers
• Key workflows, like welcome emails, cart abandonment reminders, and follow-ups after a buy, should be automated
• Tracking key metrics, running A/B tests, and making data-based changes will help you analyze and improve your email marketing
• Connect your email marketing platform to your ecommerce platform to get more out of your customer data, send emails automatically, and see how it affects your total performance

2. Affiliate marketing

Affiliate marketing involves developing partnerships with other websites or content creators to promote your products. Affiliates get paid a fee if someone buys something through a unique link.

How it works: Businesses give affiliates marketing materials such as ads and links. The affiliates post these on their blogs, websites, or social media pages. If someone clicks on an affiliate link and then buys the product, the affiliate gets a cut of the sale. Affiliates only get paid a fee if they get people to buy something. It works out well for everyone.

In this case, the Amazon Associates program is a great example. A blogger uses special affiliate links to show Amazon items on their website. The blogger’s audience then engages with the link and hopefully makes a purchase.

Affiliate marketing is a great promotional marketing strategy. Businesses can attract new customers without having to spend a lot of money upfront. The risk is low because affiliates are paid based on performance. 

Affiliates leverage their audience and content to generate revenue by promoting products they believe in. Affiliates with many followers can help a business reach more people, and affiliates promoting products their followers like can make money.

3. Social media marketing

Businesses have access to a powerful tool in social media marketing. It lets them interact with the people they want to reach, raise awareness of their brand, and keep customers engaged. Companies can get people excited and motivated to act by making appealing content and advertising on the social media sites they visit daily.

The “Live There” campaign by Airbnb is a great example of how businesses can use social media. The goal was to market the brand as a way to travel like a local. 

During the video campaign, Airbnb showed off unique local experiences in different places. Millions of people watched the campaign. This is how social media can be used to successfully share a brand’s unique value proposition with a large audience. 

You can also run contests and giveaways on social media. You can give your audience something of value in return for likes, shares, or user-generated content. This gets more people to join and share the brand. It’s a modern take on selling through word of mouth. 

4. Influencer marketing

Companies use influencer partnerships as an important part of their marketing mix. They help get the message to the right people and raise brand awareness. Companies can reach customers and enter new markets by working with social media influencers, allowing them to connect with potential customers in a real and approachable way.

Influencers can make paid posts, review products, or temporarily take over your social media account.

Deeper Sonars is an excellent example of effective influencer marketing. It is a well-known name in the fishing world that focuses on portable sonars. 70% of Deeper Sonars’ marketing budget goes to its mentor program, which is cool. It comes in three levels: 

• Paid relationships
• Deeper Squad
• Deeper Heroes

People who love fishing and Deeper products can join the Deeper Squad. The Deeper Heroes are expert anglers who fish with Deeper Sonars. 

To get the most out of influencer marketing, you must find influencers whose brand and audience fit well with yours. Think about the content’s quality, the audience’s demographics, and the engagement rate. Set clear goals and ways to measure success, and then craft your approach to fit the audience. Form genuine relationships with influencers to make accurate, high-quality content that speaks to their followers and puts transparency first — make sure that influencers disclose to their followers that the content is sponsored to keep authenticity and transparency.

5. Viral marketing

Interesting events and content can spread like wildfire on social media. This includes advertising. People want to share funny or emotional ads with others, and a viral marketing campaign is just that. Creating a marketing campaign that goes viral can help grow your brand awareness and increase sales.

The ALS Ice Bucket Challenge aimed to raise money for research and raise awareness of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and to raise money for research. People filmed themselves getting wet with ice water and challenged others to do the same or donate to the ALS cause. 

This triggered a chain reaction, and thousands of participants in the campaign. Millions of dollars were raised, and many became informed about the illness. This is an example of a successful viral marketing campaign.

Viral marketing works best when brands create content people want to share and connect with. This helps them quickly spread their message, build relationships, and make more sales.

Start by understanding your target audience. What are their likes and dislikes? Create a campaign that is unique and shareable. Something to keep in mind is that not every campaign will go viral. You may have multiple campaigns that fall short. But don’t give up — sometimes it happens when you least expect it.

6. SMS marketing

SMS marketing is a powerful tool to add to your promotional marketing campaigns. SMS messages get higher visibility than email and are fully read over 50% of the time. This channel is especially powerful when combined into an omnichannel approach. 

Using a platform like Omnisend with powerful SMS tools allows businesses to deliver consistent messages across platforms. With Omnisend’s SMS marketing automation, ecommerce stores can send relevant, fast, and interesting texts when events like abandoned carts or order confirmations are triggered. With SMS marketing, you can automatically remind your customers that they left something in their shopping cart to nudge the purchase along.

SMS is also successful in pushing timely communication, flash sales, and time-sensitive discounts. The platform’s immediacy allows for a more pressing and urgent messaging style that can drive real-time sales. You can send a flash sale text message to your audience to create urgency during slow traffic times.

Like email, SMS is best used with segmented user groups so the messages can be personalized. You should also track the results of each SMS campaign. After each campaign ends, dive deep into your analytics to see which segments and messages were most effective. Omnisend can help with all of these components of managing this channel.

How to do promotional marketing

To do promotional advertising right and hit your business goals, remember these important steps:

1. Define objectives

First, clearly define your marketing and advertising goals. Some common goals are to increase brand awareness, boost sales, release a new product, or attract more customers. Setting clear goals will help you plan your approach and assess its effectiveness.

2. Identify your target audience

Understand the kind of people who will buy from you. Research the market to learn about their demographics, preferences, and habits. If you know who these people are, you can ensure your promotional ads reach them.

3. Develop a unique selling proposition (USP)

Understand what makes your product or service unique and interesting compared to others. Your USP should clearly state your brand’s unique benefits and value. This will help buyers understand why they should choose you over competitors. 

4. Choose the right channels

To reach your target audience, choose the channels that are the best fit for your brand. Your audience spends time and likes to get information in different ways. The marketing events you choose, like those on social media, via email, direct mail, or in-store, should match those behaviors.

5. Create engaging content

Use unique ideas to make stuff that gets people’s attention and makes them want to take action. This can include graphics that catch the eye, videos that teach, persuasive text, and parts you can interact with. Make sure that your content fits with the voice and message of your brand and is unique for each promotional advertising outlet.

6. Analyze results 

After your promotional effort ends, compare its performance to your goals. Analytics tools can help you monitor ROI, engagement, and conversion rates. By looking at the results, you can see what worked well and what could be improved for future ads.

Following these steps, you can create a marketing plan that engages your target audience, spreads the word about your brand, and helps your business grow.

Great advertising marketing examples to inspire you

Need ideas for your next promo campaign? Check out these captivating examples of strategies that grab customers’ attention and boost sales: 

Flash sales

Flash sales are an effective way to increase revenue during a down month. Flash sales run like other promotions, but they have an element of immediacy. If the recipient doesn’t act fast, they will miss out. This is a great campaign to run for brand loyalists who may not have made a recent purchase. 

This email from P&Co offers shoppers 20% off with a time limit to accept the discount. P&Co sells women’s and men’s clothing, but you can see that the recommended products fall under the men’s category. This means that the brand most likely used segmentation for this campaign.

Flash sales are also a good way to leverage SMS marketing.

Free shipping offer

Free shipping has become a standard practice in the ecommerce space. However, it becomes an amazing promotional tactic if you are willing to hold back on this offer to the customer. 

You could also offer free shipping on standard orders over a certain amount to open up the free shipping option for one-time promotions. That is the case with Outdoor Research. 

Outdoor Research traditionally offer free shipping on orders of $75 or more, but this promotion offers unlimited free shipping. It is a great way to reengage past customers or to use in abandoned cart promotions.

Product launch

Product launches are an exceptional place to leverage your promotional marketing toolkit. If you have a list of dedicated brand advocates, they will want to know when you have something new to offer. 

When Sonos rolled out its Move 2 speaker, it let its loyal customers know it was coming and allowed them to pre-order the device. The email was simple because the customers already knew about Sonos. It gave some basic information on the speaker and a button to pre-order. Simple. Effective.

Wrap up

To stay ahead in 2024, you’ll need creative and effective marketing tactics for promotions. We have discussed different channels that can fit into your promotional mix, like email, SMS, social media, affiliate, and influencer marketing. 

We also looked at the type of campaigns you can run to leverage these channels, like product launches, flash sales, and free shipping deals. 

For promotional marketing to work, you need clear goals and a deep understanding of your audience. Choose the right channels, create interesting material, and keep reviewing your results to improve your strategies.

Omnisend is a robust platform to help you take full control of your promotional marketing strategy. It lets online businesses and stores create campaigns that work on different channels. It also has tools to segment your audience, personalize your messages, and monitor your results.