Sales promotion is the marketing process of lifting sales of an organization by influencing the customers through attractive benefits such as discounts, free samples, bonus packs, contests, free gifts to trigger the buying decision of the customer. Through sales promotion the company can maximize their sales, introduce new products and services to the customers, clear out inventories etc. The sales promotion is generally made on temporary basis either within a given period of time or till stocks available. The paper describes different methods and techniques of sales promotion. The paper aims in analyzing different tools of sales promotion and determines their degree of effectiveness at the time of making rural customers’ buying decision towards mobile SIM cards. The area chosen for the study is West Bengal, which is having several prominent rural areas, which comprises five subdivisions and from there the researcher have selected five towns namely Rampurhat, Islampur, Tufangunj, Tehatta and Egra. The areas have been selected due to the rural prominence. The Convenience sampling method has been used to find out the responses from the various respondents and accordingly 180 respondents have been selected on this purpose. The respondents opinion has been recorded with the help of a close ended questionnaire. The researcher has used 5 point likert scale to assess the responses properly from the selected respondents. Correlation analysis & multiple regression analysis have been used as statistical tools to find out the most important sales promotional tools.

KEYWORDS:  Sales promotion, Discounts, Free samples, Contests, Purchase decision, Ruralites