Introducing Sellforte Promotions: Measure the Real ROI of Your BFCM Discounts

BFCM (Black Friday-Cyber Monday) is over. You ran your biggest deals of the year, pushed discounts across channels, and drove a surge in orders.

Now comes the question that matters most: What did those promotions actually generate in incremental sales and profit?

Sellforte Promotions gives you that answer.

The New Way to Measure Promotion ROI 📊

Sellforte Promotions is a new add-on module that lets marketers and commercial teams analyze the incremental impact of promotions on both sales and margin by discount depth, promotion type, and product category.

In short, Sellforte Promotions reveals the real ROI of your discounts and shows which promotions made you money vs. burned margin.

Sellforte Promotions launches right after BFCM, so you can capture learnings while they’re still fresh and turn them into better decisions for the next promotional cycle.

Why Promotions Need the Same Rigor as Media 🎯

Discounts are a massive investment, often rivaling or exceeding paid media in real cost. In many retail segments, promotional giveaways (granted discounts) can account for 4–10% of total sales, making it one of the largest growth levers in the business.

But while media gets measured to the decimal, promotions are still too often judged by surface-level promoted sales. That creates two blind spots:

• You don’t know which promotions actually drove incremental sales and profit.

• Your MMM gets distorted when promotions are missing, inflating bottom-of-funnel ROI and undervaluing brand.

Recent Sellforte Labs research shows that promotions drive roughly 24% of revenue for many eCommerce and DTC brands, and excluding them makes MMM behave like last-click attribution by over-crediting tactical channels.

Sellforte Promotions fixes both problems by quantifying the true incremental impact of every promotion on sales and margin, and ensuring promotions are properly accounted for inside MMM.

What You Can Do With Sellforte Promotions 📈

Discounts shouldn’t be a guessing game. With Sellforte Promotions you can break down exactly what worked, what didn’t, and why - across discount levels, promotion types, and categories.

1. Measure Incremental Sales and Incremental Margin

Sellforte Promotions isolates the true effects of promotions, not just promoted sales.

You’ll see:

• Incremental sales uplift attributable to promotions

• Incremental profit uplift (or loss) tied directly to discounting

• ROI at both sales and margin level, with margin ROI as the recommended north star

This makes it immediately clear which BFCM promotions were profitable and which looked good on sales but destroyed margin.

2. Find the Discount “Sweet Spot”

Not all discount levels perform equally - and the best discount depth varies by category and promotion type.

Sellforte Promotions calculates ROI by:

• Discount percentile/depth (e.g., 10%, 15%, 20%, 30%, 50%+)

• Promotion type (e.g., vouchers vs. product promos vs. flash-sale mechanics)

• Category / brand

The result is a set of guardrails, what discount ranges you should favor, and where margin ROI turns negative.

3. Instantly Spot Margin-Positive vs. Margin-Negative Promotions

A big sales ROI can hide a bad truth. Promotions can increase revenue while reducing profit.

Sellforte Promotions highlights:

• Margin-positive promotions to scale

• Margin-negative promotions to stop, redesign, or use only strategically

So reviews become faster, clearer, and more actionable.

4. Make MMM and Media Recommendations More Reliable

Promotions explain a significant share of retail sales spikes, especially during periods like BFCM.

By modeling promotions properly:

• MMM attribution becomes more accurate

• Media isn’t over-credited for sales that were actually promo-driven

• Optimization scenarios work better because they reflect real on-the-ground promo intensity

In other words, Sellforte Promotions improves your understanding of both promotions and media, together.

Built for Promotion-Heavy Retailers and Brands 🏷️

Sellforte Promotions is designed for companies where discounting plays a big role in growth. If promotions drive a meaningful share of your sales, this module will quickly pay for itself by showing which offers truly create incremental value and which quietly erode margin.

You’ll get the most out of Sellforte Promotions if you are:

• A promotion-heavy retailer or brand running frequent campaigns across the year

• An omnichannel or ecommerce-first business balancing volume growth with profitability

• A team managing multiple categories, brands, markets, or promotion mechanics

• A data-driven marketing, ecommerce, or commercial team that wants clearer guardrails for discount decisions

We’re already seeing strong demand from the USA, a promotion-heavy market with many fast-growing ecommerce and DTC businesses. For these teams especially, the ability to measure real incremental sales and margin impact after major moments like BFCM is becoming essential.

What This First Release Includes - and What’s Coming Next 🛠️

The December release focuses on giving you a highly accurate historical view of promotion impact:

• Incremental sales and incremental margin

• ROI by discount depth and promotion type

• Category and brand-level insights

• Channel, country, and segment comparisons

This is a powerful foundation for better decisions today.

Over time, Sellforte Promotions will evolve toward more forward-looking, recommendation-driven optimization, building on this launch.

Pricing and Availability 💸

Sellforte Promotions will be available as an add-on for existing Sellforte customers starting December 3, priced at:

• 25% of your Sellforte subscription (minimum $1k USD/month)

If you’re a Sellforte customer and would like a walkthrough or want to add Sellforte Promotions to your plan, reach out to your CSM and they'll be happy to help.

Ready to See What BFCM Really Did? 🔎

BFCM isn’t just a sales event, it’s the biggest promotion experiment of your year.

And Sellforte Promotions helps you turn that experiment into a playbook:

• Find out what worked
• Understand what didn’t
• Go into your next promotional cycle with confidence

You can try Sellforte Promotions in our Open MMM Demo.

And if you’d like a personal in-depth demo or want to see the full Sellforte platform in action, book a short call and a member of our team will be happy to help.

We’d love to show you what your promotions are truly worth.

Author

Edward Ford is Marketing Director at Sellforte. He has over 15 years of marketing experience in B2B SaaS and Tech with specialization in marketing measurement and intelligence. Before joining Sellforte, Edward spent over 6 years at Supermetrics where he joined as an early-stage employee. Follow Edward on LinkedIn for more about marketing and growth.