Promotion fatigue exists — for both the consumers receiving offers and the retailers sending them. But they’re also necessary, so consumers and companies deal with the deluge.
Where do consumers grow tired? Blanket, generic deals that flood their inbox, no sense of knowing who they are or what they buy. Retailers and brands get worn down by the sheer number of promotions that need to be created. They also fall into a traditional trap of mass discounting, rolling out one-size-fits-all markdowns to anyone who will listen.
Of course, it’s easy to say, “personalization is the remedy.” Mass discounting, even if exhausting, drives traffic, moves inventory and keeps loyalty programs thriving. Cutting them off isn’t realistic, but retailers can become more efficient and personal. Here are tips toward reframing promotions and discounting.
Treat Promotions as Any Other Acquisition Cost
Like other acquisition costs inside a retailer’s organization, promotions deserve to be measured and developed with discipline. They also need to be working in concert with these initiatives such as paid social and affiliate marketing, which retailers track spend with rigor. Retailers know the cost per acquisition on a paid social campaign or affiliate partnership down to the decimal, and they adjust spend accordingly.
A promotional markdown, at its core, functions the same way as paid social and affiliate marketing. It’s a cost incurred to acquire or retain a customer. Besides the long history of retailers and promotions, the difference is that discounting is often managed by merchandising, planning or store operations. Affiliate marketing and paid social teams tend to sit within marketing, away from those other departments.
What retailers end up with are three acquisition channels (paid social, affiliate marketing and promotions) each with unique teams and budgets. There’s also very little communication or coordination happening between them. To become an organization that is more effective and efficient with how it delivers promotions, retailers need to unify acquisition costs as one strategy.
Within this plan, discounting and mass markdowns don’t disappear, either. It’s a cultural change, getting organizations to better manage and measure promotions. Retailers should be able to ask the same questions about a promotion that they’d ask about a paid media campaign: What did this cost to generate, did it target the right customer and did it produce a customer worth keeping? That’s discipline that leads to results.
Uncover What Shoppers Want and How They Want It
Retailers have talked about personalization for decades; now it’s time to deliver. Consumers are inundated with incentives — hitting inboxes, mailboxes and mobile apps — alongside a constant stream of programmatic ads on nearly every webpage.
The truth is the ads are becoming noise. XCCommerce’s 2026 Retail Promotions Shopper Study found that three-quarters of the consumers surveyed said it’s important for offers to feel personalized.
Half of the consumers in the survey said they don’t care where they get an offer as long as it works consistently across channels. Ensuring incentives are consistent, accurate and personalized comes with a highly disciplined promotions process. What’s more, knowing what types of offers work best for certain consumers, when and where, may seem like a marketing problem, but it’s really a data and systems challenge.
Streamline Technology Systems to Achieve Personalization
Moving from a system of mass discounting to more personalized, targeted offers require a unified view of how a customer shops. Retailers need cross-channel data funneling to one centralized location for promotions engines to access.
Only then can promotions teams dig in and understand how a customer shops, which channel they browse in, where they tend to purchase, what they’ve bought before and what kinds of incentives they redeem. Without that view, personalization becomes a handful of segments layered on top of the same blanket discount. That’s not personalization.
A single storewide markdown is one offer to configure. A personalized strategy might mean building distinct offers for different segments of the same loyalty base, each with its own eligibility rules, and then making sure those offers don’t conflict with a manufacturer coupon or another loyalty benefit already in the basket. The complexity multiplies fast, and it must be managed centrally.
Consider a specialty retailer that wants to send a first-time buyer a modest discount to drive trial, while offering a top-tier loyalty member a points bonus instead of a price cut, on the same product, in the same week. That only works if the underlying engine can apply the right rule to the right shopper, in real time, without the two offers stacking into a mistake at checkout.
Delivering Incentives With Precision
Retailers need to be more precise in how they send promotions, targeting who gets what, when and why. With that level of personalization, consumers will be more responsive to promos overall.
It starts with treating incentives as an acquisition cost, instilling discipline into promotions and building a more unified infrastructure. Data and systems must be in sync, designed to deliver targeted, rule-based offers to unique customers.
There’s power in precise promotions. Retailers don’t need to go cold turkey on blanket offers, but they need to make a targeted, personalized strategy the anchor to their promotions strategy. If they do, they’ll create stronger relationships with their consumers, improve margins and grow their businesses.
Dan Surtees serves as VP of strategy at XCCommerce, partnering with top retailers to design and execute promotions and loyalty initiatives that fuel sustainable growth and deepen customer engagement. Since 2020, he has played a key role in advancing competitive positioning through data-driven strategy and innovation. With over two decades in retail, Surtees combines leadership across product, marketing, sales and enterprise technology to deliver measurable impact.
