Promotional Planning: Optimize Your Strategy and Execution

What makes a successful promotion? Which promotions deliver the highest ROI for you?

Every day, we’re exposed to promotions. Influenced by some; numb to others. We should be great at knowing what works and what doesn’t.

Successful promotions require objectives and goals, a well-understood target audience, a substantial value proposition, a sense of urgency, great timing, clear communication, little to no participation barriers, attention-grabbing messages, multiple channels execution, and measurement. 

Promotions are simple. Successful promotions are not.

Retail promotion planning sounds straightforward: choose an offer, pick your channels, set your timing. But any merchant knows that creating a successful promotion, one that drives profit and loyalty, is anything but simple because promotions are a delicate balance of art and science.

The Challenge: Why Successful Promotions Are Hard to Repeat

Retailers may get a promotion “right” but repeating that success across weeks, seasons, or holidays is another story. Shopper behavior evolves constantly, and what worked yesterday may not work tomorrow.

As Thomas J. Barratt, the father of modern advertising, said over a century ago, “tastes change, fashions change, and the advertiser has to change with them.” In today’s world, change happens not in generations but in days or weeks. Think: serious supply chain disruptions, inflation and tariffs, overall food costs, and consumer sentiment. In short, consumer preferences shift faster than most retailers can react.

A Deloitte study found that while 93% of grocers believed “locally sourced” mattered most to shoppers, only 60% of consumers agreed, and that number dropped 20 points since 2019. Proof that the gap between retailer perception and consumer reality is widening.

The best promotion optimization tools go beyond analyzing prior promotions to determine what should be eliminated. Instead, they direct your future promotions to achieve desired outcomes. Some of those methods are below.

Core Elements of Effective Promotional Planning

Winning promotions require continuous optimization.

The best retail teams use AI and machine learning to uncover what truly drives results and apply those insights at scale.

Circular and Flyer Optimization

Weekly circulars and flyers remain central to grocery promotions. But deciding which products to feature, where to place them, and what offers to include can be guesswork.

With intelligent flyer optimization, retailers can:

–See how ad placement or offer type affects shopper response.

–Predict lift, revenue, and profit for each featured item.

–Identify potential out-of-stocks before promotions launch.

Temporary Price Reductions

Trade-funded promotions can boost sales but only if they align with your overall business goals. Optimization ensures you balance vendor offers with shopper preferences and profit targets, creating win-win outcomes for you, your suppliers, and your customers.

Leveraging Item’s Role

Not every product should be promoted the same way.

Effective planning considers each item’s strategic role:

• Margin Driver – builds profit
• Traffic Driver – increases trips
• Basket Builder – boosts total spend
• Loyalty Builder – strengthens retention
• Seasonal Item – drives short-term excitement

Promotion optimization validates these roles and reveals how they evolve, helping retailers fine-tune what truly influences results.

Ensuring Strategies and Targets

Every promotion needs measurable goals: profit, revenue, and unit targets. Optimization platforms identify the right balance of items, discounts, and vehicles to hit those goals efficiently and repeatably.

Scenario Analysis and What-Ifs

A single promotion requires hundreds of decisions. Wouldn’t you want to see the impact of even the slightest change? Wouldn’t you like to know what would happen if you:

• Raised/lowered prices by 10% instead of 20%?
• Changed from a 50% discount to a buy one, get one offer?
• Substituted the item on the front page of a circular?
• Decreased the discounted price from $1.89 to $1.79?
• Increased the lift by 5%?
• Adjusted your promotion strategy?

And on and on and on.

The best what-if analyses are seamless throughout the application. They allow users to ask questions, make changes, and see the impacts of those changes at every step in the creation process.

Accurate and Integrated Forecasting

Nothing drives customers crazy more than receiving a promotion and wanting to buy, but no more inventory exists. It’s frustrating. Even the best promotions fail if shelves are empty. Integrated forecasting connects your promotion plans with replenishment systems to reduce stockouts and overstocks, ensuring customer satisfaction and margin protection.

Price and Promotion Optimization – Together

Everyday pricing and promotions are deeply connected.

Intelligent pricing systems model both simultaneously, helping you determine when to discount, when to hold price, and how to balance frequency with depth to sustain value perception.

Crafting successful promotions is an intricate blend of art and science. Modern promotion methods require a comprehensive and data-driven approach, from optimizing circulars and leveraging temporary price reductions to understanding the roles of different items and conducting detailed scenario analyses. While executing a good promotion may seem straightforward, it requires continuous adaptation to ensure sustained success.

Intelligent Promotion Optimization

ClearDemand helps grocers move beyond trial-and-error promotion planning. Our AI-powered promotion optimization platform:

• Analyzes historical performance to identify what truly drives ROI.
• Recommends optimal product mixes, price points, and vehicles to meet strategic goals.
• Integrates with your pricing and replenishment systems for seamless execution.
• Enables real-time “what-if” analysis and forecasting to eliminate guesswork.

By combining elasticity-based modeling with advanced scenario simulation, ClearDemand enables retailers to optimize every promotion for maximum impact: improving margin, volume, and customer loyalty while reducing waste.

Promotions are simple. Successful promotions are not.
With ClearDemand, they can be.