What do you know about NetSuite’s SuitePromotions? SuitePromotions adds a useful element to a company’s marketing efforts. Promotions provide discounts that can be used strategically in your marketing campaigns, resulting in higher quantities of sales.
Types of Promotions
NetSuite has five types of promotions: item promotions, fixed-price item promotions, order promotions, shipping promotions, and free gift promotions. Each of these types focuses on providing discounts in specific ways. For example, an item promotion provides a discount by removing a set percentage of an item’s cost, while an order promotion provides a discount by removing a set percentage of an entire order’s cost.
Benefits of Promotions
What are some of the benefits of using SuitePromotions in NetSuite? NetSuite has added several enhancements that increase the effectiveness of the SuitePromotions feature. For one thing, promotions can be exclusive or stackable. If a promotion is exclusive, then only that promotion can be applied to an order, whereas more than one stackable promotion can be added (“stacked”) on a single order. You can also allow certain promotions to auto-apply to qualifying orders, and if different combinations of promotions could apply, then you can have the system select the best combination of promotions for the customer.
SuitePromotions also allows you to automatically add a free gift to certain transactions, to create customer-specific promotions that are tailored to certain customer groups, and to set a qualifying item quantity, where customers would need to be purchasing a set quantity of items for a promotion to be applied to the transaction. And because of SuitePromotions’ audit and visibility feature, you can easily track exactly which promotions and combinations of promotions have been applied to which transactions.
Creating Promotions
So, how can you go about creating promotions in NetSuite? To create promotions in NetSuite, you’ll need to enable a few features and then create a promotion record.
Promotions Features to Enable
First, there are several features you will need to enable. The first set of features are located in Enable Features. You can access them by navigating to Enable Features and selecting the Transactions subtab. Under the Sales section, check that Promotion Codes, SuitePromotions, and Auto-Apply Promotions are all turned on. Enabling SuitePromotions ensures that the promotions subtab will appear on sales orders, cash sale transactions, invoices, and return authorizations. Then, go to the Company subtab of Enable Features and turn on the Locations feature under the Classifications section. You would need this feature if you have any promotions that track eligibility based on the customer’s location.
If you intend to provide free shipping on eligible transactions, then you can allow that feature by navigating to Setup > Marketing > Preferences > Promotions Preferences. On this page, you can determine if the free shipping will be based on the order total either before or after any discounts have been applied.
The Promotion Record
Once you have enabled the features you need, you are ready to create a new promotion record. Navigate to Lists > Marketing > Promotions > New. On this page, you will need to select the type of promotion. While the options available to you when creating new promotions will change slightly based on the promotion type, all the promotion types share some key elements. Some of these elements include the ability to set a time frame for the promotion, provide a coupon code for the promotion, and target specific customers with the promotion. You can also set buy and get conditions—in other words, what a customer would need to buy in order to be eligible for the promotion, and the deal the customer would get as a result of the promotion. A couple other elements you can determine are limiting the promotion to specific sales channels or limiting the number of times one customer can use the same promotion.
Using Promotions
Promotions can be used in the following ways: on a transaction directly in NetSuite, on an online store order, and at the point of sale in SuiteCommerce InStore (SCIS). For the sake of our purposes, we’re just going to look at using promotions on transactions directly in NetSuite. To do this, you would need to create a new sales order. Before you can add a promotion to the sales order, first you need to add both a customer and at least one item to the order. Then, under the Promotions subtab, you can select any promotions you wish to apply to the transaction.
Conclusion
SuitePromotions is an excellent way to supplement your company’s marketing efforts. If this post helped you understand NetSuite better, join the SuiteRep newsletter below to receive future posts directly in your inbox once a week!