Our marketing manager Chris is planning a sales campaign for the company’s best-selling SmartWatch X. He wants customers to know that there’s a promotion running — but instead of showing the discount only after it has been applied, he wants to advertise the promotion upfront.
By using a potential promotion in SAP Commerce Cloud, Chris can display a message letting customers know that a deal is available. This message appears before the discount is triggered, nudging shoppers to add more items to their cart so they don’t miss out.
Basic Introduction
A potential promotion provides marketers with a way to advertise an offer before customers qualify for it. Instead of waiting until the discount is applied, a message can be displayed in the storefront that highlights the promotion in advance. This helps build anticipation and encourages shoppers to adjust their behavior to qualify, such as adding more items to their cart or increasing item quantities to raise the total cart amount.
With potential promotions, you can:
- Inform customers early about discounting opportunities.
- Motivate them to spend more by showing how close they are to qualifying.
- Use the promise of discounts to influence the purchase of specific products, or products in a featured category.
- Ensure that messaging is seamlessly connected to the actual promotion rule, which delivers the discount once conditions are met.
For example, if a customer adds just one SmartWatch X to their cart, they might see a teaser message: "Buy one more and get it for free!". Once they add a second SmartWatch X, the teaser disappears and the system applies the promotion. The customer is then greeted with a confirmation message: "Congratulations! You’ve unlocked your discount!".
By using potential promotions, marketers can drive higher basket sizes, provide customers with clearer visibility into offers, and create a smoother shopping experience that balances both encouragement and reward.
Step by Step Setup
Now that you understand what a potential promotion is and why it’s useful, let’s walk through the process of creating one in SAP Commerce Cloud. This setup involves two rules working together:
The actual promotion rule, which applies the real discount once customers qualify.
The potential promotion rule, which displays a teaser message before the discount is triggered.
By following the steps below, you’ll see how to configure both rules and understand how they interact to provide a smooth customer experience.
Step 1: Creating the Actual Promotion Rule
We begin by setting up the rule that delivers the discount itself. In the SAP Commerce Cloud back-end, Chris selects the "Buy X get Y free" template and names the rule SmartWatchX_Discount. He assigns it a priority of 200, a value high enough to ensure this discount takes precedence over teaser messages.
Chris sets the campaign’s start and end dates to limit the promotion ot the planned period. He then sets the condition: when a customer adds at least two SmartWatch X watches to their cart, the promotion is triggered. The action is to apply a 100% discount on the second watch.
To confirm success for the shopper, he adds a celebratory message: "Congratulations! You’ve received a discount on your SmartWatch X purchase!". With this, the rule is saved and published, ready to go live.
Step 2: Creating the Potential Promotion Rule
Next comes the teaser rule — the part that advertises the promotion before customers qualify for it. Chris creates a new rule called SmartWatchX_PotentialPromotion and assigns it a priority of 100, ensuring it is evaluated after the discount rule, whose priority was higher. That allows the teaser rule to choose not to run if the discount rule was triggered.
The dates are aligned with the actual promotion, keeping both rules in sync. Chris writes a motivating message that customers will see when they are close to qualifying: "Buy one more SmartWatchX and get one free!".
The conditions are straightforward:
- The actual promotion rule (SmartWatchX_Discount) must not have triggered.
- The customer’s cart must contain at least one SmartWatch X.
The action is simply to display the teaser message. Once everything is defined, Chris saves and publishes the rule.
Step 3: Seeing It in Action
With both rules active, the customer journey becomes clear: When a shopper adds a single SmartWatch X to their cart, the system displays the teaser: "Buy one more and get one free!"
The moment a second SmartWatch X is added to the cart, the discount is applied, which causes the teaser to disappears. The following confirmation message appears: "Congratulations! You’ve received a discount on your SmartWatchX purchase!".
This sequence shows how potential promotions create awareness and motivation, while the actual promotion delivers the reward.
