Breaking News: ToolsGroup acquires Mi9 Retail Demand Management Business creating a prowerful production-to-purchase planning solution.
Plan Multi-Channel Promotions That Drive Sales and Improve Margins
Mi9 Retail makes it easy to plan, forecast, and analyze campaigns, promotions, and events. By managing all types of promotions across all channels in a centralized system, companies now have the ability to coordinate activities between the various departments that are involved in the process, from merchandising to marketing and advertising.
Mi9 Retail gives you the power to easily and accurately plan successful future promotions, incorporate their impact into the overall retail planning process, and evaluate their effectiveness. The result is promotions that attract new and existing customers, increase revenues, and reduce inventory levels and marketing costs.
Watch the Promotion Management for Merchandising Video
Watch this short video to learn about the key features and benefits of Mi9 Promotion Management for Merchandising and see it in action.
PLAN
Plan Successful Campaigns and Events and Create and New Promotions
Campaign & Event Calendar
The calendar view displays all campaigns and events together in a Gantt chart format allowing users to navigate to a specific campaign or date and view all related events. Color-coding is used to visually differentiate the various campaigns and event types. The campaign color is selected during campaign creation while event color is dictated by event type.
Event Creation Wizard
New events are easily created using the new event wizard, which walks the user through defining the event name, associated campaign, event type, budget, and ad and sales start and end dates. Typically, each event represents a separate channel with unique effective dates, production schedule, and budgets.
Event Building
After an event is created using a defined event type, the planner can start to customize the event. Users can add and modify slot sets, create and delete geographies, modify site assignments, and build out a detailed budget. Users can then decide which vendor deals or promotions to include in the event. A visual representation of each promotion provides instant feedback by displaying the content, pricing, and any associated digital assets.
Select Targeting Options
The default targeting for each event is predefined based on event type. For print events, the segments might be geographic, while for electronic events, the segments might be demographic. The segments can also be mixed to allow for demographic segmentation within a geographic area. The targeting can be changed at any time allowing planners to quickly react to changing market conditions.
Set Promotion-Level Price Clusters
Users can group stores/sites together within a promotion so that they can be targeted with common pricing strategies. Multiple price strategies can be set by price cluster within a single promotion to allow for easy management and monitoring. In addition, the products promoted for each price cluster in a promotion can be varied to account for regional availability and targeting.
Watch the Promotion Management for Marketing Video
Watch this short video to learn about the key features and benefits of Mi9 Promotion Management for Marketing and see it in action.
FORECAST
Select the Optimal Products to Promote and then Forecast Impact on Demand
Promotion Forecasting
As promotions are planned, Promotion Forecasting captures the promotional lift impact and automatically adjusts the forecast for the period of the promotion. The system then automatically calculates the financial impact of each planned promotion. Configurable metrics include net margin, net cost, projected sales, lift factors, vendor participation, and loyalty program impact.
Manual Override
There will be times when external factors that are not captured in the system will affect the performance of a promotion. For these times, or for new products that are unique, planners can override the system generated forecast. You can configure which factors can be overridden and by which users. Additionally, all financial calculations can use the override values.
What-if Planning
During the planning process, users can evaluate multiple scenarios to identify which variables will provide the desired results. Users can change the price strategy, customer segmentation, price, promotional channel, vendor funding, and many other configurable variables. The system then re-forecasts based on the new information. In addition, the boundaries that the forecasting engine uses can be constrained based on user preference within the approved corporate margin.
Watch the Promotion Management for Advertising Video
Watch this short video to learn about the key features and benefits of Mi9 Promotion Management for Advertising and see it in action.
EXECUTE
Quickly and Easily Move Planned Promotions Through the Execution Process
Manage Content and Versions
All marketing copy, disclaimers, and special callouts can be managed within a centralized content repository. The repository stores all content needed across all channels, and depending on format, will utilize the appropriate fields for each advertising vehicle and channel. For added flexibility, the fields are user-definable.
Tailored versions of the content can be created for different markets, customer segments, and channels. This allows for greater control of the marketing messages delivered to consumers. Versions are typically based on language, localized interests, and channels, and content versions can be pre-associated to their intended target audiences to enable automated versioning
Manage Digital Assets
Digital assets are managed from a centralized dashboard including product images, manufacturer logos, and icons. The digital assets can be used for display in different channels. The system supports thumbnails and low-resolution images as well as high resolution, print-ready images.
Visual Layout Templates
The template builder can be used to create a central library of designs for each channel ensuring that a consistent design is used across all campaigns and events in each channel. Planning visually enables a more efficient process by eliminating guesswork and re-work due to multiple proofing stages. The shortened process also improves time to market for promotions.
Online Proofing
Promotions can be viewed online to ensure proof accuracy, which is significantly more time- and cost-efficient than producing and circulating hard copies for view and approval. Workflows can be configured to control the review and approval processes and keep users focused on the tasks for which they are accountable. Moderators can also control and track access and keep records of annotations, versions, and proofs at each event proofing stage.
Automated Publishing
After promotions are approved, the content can be automatically exported to the appropriate execution systems for each channel. For print, the system can output directly to Adobe InDesign and Quark Xpress. For web, email, and broadcast, the system can easily integrate with in-house or agency systems. There are also direct links for social and mobile messaging to ensure that your promotions reach the widest possible audience.
ANALYZE
Analyze and Evaluate the Effectiveness and Profitability of Promotional Programs
Understand Category Impact
When evaluating the effectiveness of promotions, it is important to understand how they impacted the overall product category. Without this information, you may get a false reading on how well your promotional efforts are contributing to the bottom line. Mi9 Retail helps you identify the impact each promotional offer had on the overall category in order to avoid cannibalization of other key products.
Analyze Promotional Space
In order to understand how to better allocate space for different products and categories in print advertising, you must start by analyzing the return on investment (ROI) of each page. Mi9 Retail helps you understand how effective the pages were across different zones for an entire campaign and how each category performed based on the amount of space it was allocated.
Determine the Media Mix
How should you allocate your advertising budget across various media channels? For example, you need to decide how much to invest in print advertising versus social media, like Facebook or Twitter. Understanding the impact that both new and traditional advertising channels will have on your bottom line is key. Mi9 Promotion Management helps you determine which channels will result in the biggest return on your advertising investment.
Measure Ad Spend ROI
Mi9 Retail helps you understand how responsive products are on promotion by analyzing their performance during non-promoted periods and comparing that to the results from each promotion. The solution also takes into account advertising spend to calculate the true margin obtained for each product during a promotional period, delivering you with an accurate picture for the impact a promotion has had on the overall business.
