The Ultimate Guide to Running Effective Discount Promotions

This post will show you the marketing potential of offering unique (random) discount codes to customers. 

You will also:

• Learn how to generate random discount codes.
• Explore the best and most secure ways to distribute your codes to subscribers. 
• Learn the best ways to analyze the performance of your coupon campaign. 

There’s a lot to uncover here so we’d better get started.

Promotional campaigns that use unique, one-off codes are no doubt marketer-friendly. This is because they are way easier to control and track – and that eventually leads to achieving higher ROI faster. They do have a major drawback though; it’s much harder to build that kind of campaign from a software perspective. 

Firstly, your dev team has to spend time on generating unique, hard-to-guess codes. Secondly, every time the new campaign is released, developers have to adapt your e-commerce system to recognize new codes properly. Only then can customers redeem their coupons on your checkout page seamlessly.

The good news is that Voucherify supports unique discount coupons too; reducing the software issues we just mentioned to just a few lines of code.

When would you need unique codes?

If you want to publish one, reusable code available to anyone, anytime and under all circumstances, coupon marketing is like a child’s play. The problems begin to pile up as you try to restrict the coupon use, track redemption rates and calculate the ROI.

Do you have an offer only for your newsletter subscribers? Or perhaps you want to reward the most loyal customers with a new sweet deal? Those are just some examples of when unique discount codes could prove handy. With Voucherify, launching a discount campaign for unique, hard-to-guess codes is as easy as the fixed-code deals, but the additional benefit of unique coupons is that you ensure that your offer will only get to the targeted audience.  Now, that’s a fairly cool way of keeping your promotional offerings under control, isn’t it? 

Now, let’s take a look at a few tips that would take your unique codes to the next level of coolness.

Design your Unique Codes

The Voucherify coupon creator lets you create thousands of unique coupon codes. As in the case of the fixed-code coupons, you can choose one of 3 discount types. Plus, you can set the expiry date or cap the number of redemptions. While designing the system for generating unique codes or deciding between different coupon providers, make sure that you can still configure the codes’ length, prefix or charset. Or that you can even come up with a completely custom pattern (you can test different patterns at generator.voucherify.io).

Sending out codes that have no catchy pattern or no thought behind their form can work, but you can do so much more than that. Transform your codes to become something more – keep them consistent with the occasion and your brand style.

In general, once the codes have been generated, you can be 100% sure they’re unique among any other campaigns in your account. Or can you? If you decide to create your own coupon infrastructure, you need to write a big chunk of code to ensure the uniqueness of your codes. With Voucherify, you get this out-of-the-box.

Get personal with personalized promo codes

Alright, so now you can add another super significant parameter to your coupon experiments - customer segments. We’ll cover this area in further posts, but for now, let’s take a look at the operational side of unique code campaigns - how you can automate the process of coupon delivery to your users and how to ensure that good redemption experience which should be unforgettable, after all.

The usual question from fixed-code campaigns: “who redeemed the coupon?” turns into “why did/didn’t this particular customer redeem it?”.

Automated unique codes distribution 

Pushing out unique codes can be the most troublesome task in coupon marketing. That’s why we addressed this issue from the very beginning. There are many ways of achieving this with Voucherify:

• Export to CSV.
• Distribute with MailChimp.
• Send emails or SMS.
• Use Intercom as a distribution channel.
• Dynamic publish.
• Web channels.
• Push notifications.
• Use other 3rd party providers.

Most of them can be triggered from the user interface. The first (CSV) should be self-explanatory. The second is more interesting; it lets you deliver coupons directly to your MailChimp lists (straightforward or by using the automations). It’s done with a merge tags feature.

This should save you a lot of time because Voucherify enables you to sync all MailChimp lists and add them to your Voucherify database.

Two following options use Distribution Manager as well as it happens in case of MailChimp distribution. To describe each delivery model, let’s take a look at the Distribution Manager. It allows you to deliver coupon codes with a couple of clicks, straight from the dashboard. The first thing to understand is that you can customize the coupon distribution on two levels:

• Channel – Voucherify enables you to use a wide range of delivery channels e.g. email, SMS, Intercom, MailChimp through merge tags or custom integration.

• Trigger – You can distribute coupons manually or define when Voucherify should automatically trigger a send out.

These levels can be mixed, so you do both:

• A manual send out of emails.
• Activate the following scenario: every time a customer joins one of your MailChimp lists, take a unique code from a campaign and assign it to him through a merge tag.

The last option, dynamic publication is a bit different. It allows you to assign a unique code from a given campaign to a particular customer programmatically. Imagine, for example, the case of displaying a random code per user session on a landing page.

This is fairly easy to implement with the dynamic publication method, granted, it does need a bit more effort from your developers, but at the same time it enables you to reach out to the myriad of tools working on different marketing channels. And it can be used with Zapier too.

Independent of the method/channel used, every time you deliver the coupon code Voucherify marks this information in the system. In this way you know:

• To whom the code was delivered,
• when it was pushed out,
• and through which channel.

With the user interface, you can take a bigger picture look at all codes publications within a single campaign. You can also analyze each code separately.

Metrics and monitoring – keeping unique codes under control

Finally, when it comes to monitoring, there are some helpful views in Voucherify. You can analyze each campaign separately and also compare the performance of many of them side by side. So, calculating the ROI just got easier; now, you are able to see at a glance how your campaigns are performing.

On top of that, you can inspect every successful and failed redemption separately within a single campaign. By doing so regularly, you are able to catch and fix problems before a customer makes a complaint. This is one way to improve the coupon redemption experience.

Summary

The bulk unique coupon campaigns are a perfect supplement for fixed-code offers. Whereas the latter are good for gaining more traffic, the former can be used for precise targeting in your promotional activities.

If the “precise targeting” reminds you of the customer segments, then we have good news for you: Voucherify supports them too by allowing you to filter out customers that are eligible to redeem a coupon from a particular campaign.

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