1. User's Guide
  2. Promotions

10 Promotions

Promotions Overview

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

What's a Promotion

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

Promotion is often applied when the customer buys the product offerings with the price or amount surpassing the certain limit. The typical example is the Buy 1 and get 1 free or Buy $100 and get $10 reduction. Promotions are always provided around a set of pre-defined criteria. As a product administrator, you can define the criteria and as a product manager you can configure the promotion as well as retire and obsolete the promotion when it is no longer required. You can view and change an event's priority before confirming the promotion entity.

Types of Promotions

Promotions in Launch are of types of Award, Discount, and Reduction.
  • 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 discount event on the top in an event list takes priority over those below it.

Mutually exclusive discount via promotion

Ensure that discounts are 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 get the location based benefit if they are from locations 101, 103 as the events are mutually exclusive. If a customer purchases only Supremo Prime from location 101, they get 10% off on prime.

Aggregate discount 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.

Promotion Tags

Promotion tags specify how promotions are used in the context of product offerings. Optionally, as a product manager, you might want to include certain tags for an offer by attaching a promotion profile specification to it, which are created through REST APIs. Promotion tags help you define a promotion criteria. At runtime, based on the promotion profile attached, offerings which match the promotion profile are filtered.

As a product manager, when configuring an offering of type simple and bundled offer (service, commercial, packages), you can add, edit, or remove promotion tags by allowing the user to choose the promotion profile specification entity which has attributes and attribute values.

For example, configure an iPhone 12 simple atomic offering, which is associated to the promotion profile specification called Apple Device specification. The promotion profile specification has the attributes brand, series, and type. The user can specify the brand as Apple, Series as 12, and Type as Device.

How are criteria parameters obtained?

Criteria parameters come from Custom Profile Specifications. As a product administrator, you configure these characteristics 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 characteristics could be:

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

Events and Benefits

Here's how you work with events and benefits for your promotion.

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 one promotion is evaluated, within it every event is evaluated individually, if it is configured that way. Based on the number of events you configured, each event will be evaluated individually.

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

Criterion and Criteria Group

Creating an event requires that you must set the criteria for each event. Criteria consists of criteria groups and criterion within them. The logical relationship between different groups is decided by the relationTypeInGroup. A vital element of setting up a criteria is setting 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 criterion that you might create within each criteria group. While creating individual criterion parameter level 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

Promotions must be associated to a price list. As a product manager, you can associate or disassociate promotions to a price list. You can view the promotions in a price list and can 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 the qualifying product.

  • Buy 3 handsets and get 10% discount.

Cross-Product Discounts

Define and manage cross-product discounts.

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

Promotions continue to work as the standard TMF 671.

Device Trade In

Configure device trade-in programs so that your customers can upgrade to the new devices by availing credits or discounts on their old devices.

You create and manage device trade-in programs from the Administration section of the Launch home page.

When you define a trade-in program, you also specify the following:

  • Initiative to which the trade-in program is associated.
  • Duration for which these programs are effective.
  • Device specification, which could be an IMEI number or any other specification based on the response questionnaire of the trade-in device.
  • Redemption or benefit type where you can specify multiple values such as gift, discount, and so on.
  • Whether the offer is eligible for maximum, minimum, or percentage trade-in value depending on the condition of the trade-in device.

You must define the device trade-in programs for specific product lines or categories. Doing so would ensure that all offers associated to the specified product line or category are eligible for the trade-in program.

If you don’t specify the product line or category in a trade-in program, the trade-in program will be applicable to all the offers in the Launch application. Remember that you can’t specify the same product line or category in more than one active trade-in program.

Determine the Trade-In Value

Use the trade-in questionnaire to determine the quality. This questionnaire enables the run-time system to calculate the approximate value of the trade-in device based on the responses. For example, you can start with whether the old device switches on, has physical damages, and so on. This enables other applications to estimate the value of the old device, which is then offset against the price of the new device.

You can configure another set of checklist questions covering what must be verified in the old devices that you receive as part of the trade-in program. This would help you revise the initial estimate based on the actual condition of the trade-in device. These questions could verify whether the device is locked (with an operator), screen is functioning properly, and so on.

Here are some scenarios for creating a trade-in questionnaire:

  • Define one or more sets of device qualification questions with each set containing a series of questions for device trade-ins.
  • Use the two response options to configure interrelated questions in several ways. For example, if the device does not turn on at all, then you do not need to consider all other questions related to whether the device is working properly to estimate the trade-in value.
  • Each response in a qualifier question would have a relative value of the trade-in price of the old device as percentage reduction, minimum value, or maximum value depending on the response.
  • Provide a description for each choice a user would make.

Create a Promotion

Here's how you can create a promotion.

  1. Go to Promotion Management > Create Promotion.

  2. On the Promotions page, provide the identifying information like name and description.
  3. Specify the effective period the promotion is valid.
    • In the Other Information section, specify the following: Initiative the promotion is associated with; Promotion type; Price List; and Promotion profile specification.

  4. 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.

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

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

    Note:

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

  7. Add the criteria group name.

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

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

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

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

  12. Click Add Event.

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

  14. Click Create.

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

Add a Promotion Tag

Here's how you can add a promotion tag to an offer.

  1. Go to Offer Management.

  2. On the Offers page, from the Actions drop-down list, select either Create a Simple Offer or Create a Bundle Offer.

  3. As you create the offer, on the Marketing Information page, Promotions Tag section, click Add Promotion Tag.

  4. On the New Promotion Tag page, from the Promotion Profile Specification drop-down list, select your promotion profile specification.

  5. Click Add.

You have now added a promotion tag to your offer.