Why Do You Need an Offer Management Platform For Your Business?

In 2022, 80% of US consumers said that they used online coupons and digital offers while shopping, and this number is expected to grow. With the unstopping growth of online offers and promotions, the trick is not just how to run them effectively, but how to turn them into a satisfactory profit.

Running a myriad of promotions for various audiences and channels leaves your offers susceptible to fraud. And fraud inevitably leads to losses in revenue and chaos in your operations. As a result, marketers are often wary of trying new media and tools that would further complicate their promotional activities. Luckily, there is a solution that meets the needs of the present-day digital transformation in the market: namely, offer management software.

What is an Offer Management Platform (OMP)?

An offer management platform is a type of designated offer management software that helps marketers create, manage, distribute, secure, and track digital offers across various channels and audiences. With a dedicated offer management platform, you get to control your offers throughout their entire lifecycle.

Overall, an offer management platform empowers businesses to efficiently optimize their promotional offers, ultimately helping them drive sales, enhance customer loyalty, leverage data, and streamline their marketing efforts.

Using offer management software, you can get the most value out of your offers by getting help with the following action points:

• Offer release.
• Automated offer delivery across digital channels and markets.
• Offer redemption at checkout.
• Creating easily updatable 360° customer profiles.
• Designing more personalized and smart offers for each new campaign.
• Monitoring of user purchase patterns, behaviors, and habits.
• Control over the offer creation and distribution flow.
• Better offer security by reducing spending and fraud risk.
• Task automation.
• Offer tracking and management.

You can also understand OMPs as an intermediary between your POS systems and digital channels. Once your marketers taste the power of using dedicated offer management software that effectively streamlines their operations, they will never want to run promotions without it.

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The Benefits of Using an Offer Management Platform

1. Optimize offer management

As simple as that: an offer management platform simplifies, structures, and centralizes the entire offer creation and management process to make it more efficient. This way, it enables you to create digital offers with ease and distribute them across multiple channels and points of sale. This simply saves your time and resources.

As a result, you may concentrate your offer creation on the desired effect, which is increased sales. An offer management platform lets you plan and coordinate compelling and targeted offers to attract and incentivize customers. By strategically designing and implementing your offers, you are on the best way to increasing conversion rates and boosting your revenue.

2. Target offers at selected customer profiles

With dedicated offer management software in place, you don’t have to share your incentives with everyone. This way, you can target only specific customer segments that will genuinely appreciate your offers. An effective offer management platform should equip you with an actionable pool of data to base offers on customer attributes, order structure, past transactional activity, or any other custom attribute appropriate for your business.

Targeting doesn’t only mean a better and more personalized offer. It also means that you are better prepared to protect your marketing budget. How? With an offer management platform in your stack, you get to protect your personalized offers both against fraud attempts on the part of customers and against internal communication mishaps by establishing proper access workflow.

3. Safeguard against viral offers

The times of printed offers received through direct mail or cut from magazines are gone. The rapid digitization of offers opened up a whole venue for possible fraud. Customers can quickly duplicate offers, abuse redemption rules, or, which happens quite often, give fake credentials in exchange for a coupon code.

Of course, marketers quickly reacted to the booming coupon fraud market by using quick and easy strategies for mitigating fraud risk and verifying customer eligibility. Here are just a few of them:

• Short expiration dates.
• Redemption limits.
• Precise customer targeting.
• Geo-targeted codes.
• Email verification.
• IP monitoring.
• More secure ways of distributing codes.

But that’s not enough. In 2022, coupon fraud constituted 30% of the most common types of fraud attacks experienced by online merchants worldwide, with loyalty and affiliate program abuse each account for 22% of the fraud cases. How can offer management software help in preventing and counteracting fraudulent customer activity?

Well, by using a dedicated offer management platform, your marketing team can securely share offers via multiple online channels (email, push notification, social media) without the fear that customers might hijack the offer. You can introduce single-use codes and automatically block multiple redemptions at the checkout. If you share offers via email, use email security checks such as double opt-in, blocking aliases, or checking for unique addresses.

4. Become better at segmentation

The customer base is arguably the most valuable source of data. You always need to make sure that it’s updated, properly sorted, and consistently labeled. When your marketing team gets an idea for a new promotional offer, you need to know your customers’ demographics as well as their needs, expectations, and other key characteristics. Here, customer segmentation is your greatest ally.

Segmentation is about analyzing who your ideal customers are and how to distinguish them from others. If you take a closer look at your business’s specifics and existing customers, you will quickly discover that they are not the same. A dedicated offer management system can streamline the segmentation process. Thanks to it, marketers can better understand when and how customers react to your offers. They find out what their preferences and interests are and which of these are crucial to earning their trust and engagement.

5. Gain valuable insights

With an offer management platform, you can finally break the cycle of hit-or-miss offers. With a proper tracking and analytics system in place, you get to see the customer path to purchase in its entirety, at both a granular and global scale. This way, your marketing magicians can connect information about audiences, their past purchase choices, the channels they use, and other conversion-related attributes into one holistic dataset about your audience engagement.

Without an offer management platform, marketers are forced to outsource coupon delivery and tracking to massive coupon aggregates or build a custom offer management solution from scratch, risking more than a few complaints from the IT guys. Luckily, by creating a database of offers, an offer management platform can help you analyze customer trends and learn all you need to know to make smarter moves in the future.

6. Build customer loyalty

We can all agree that loyal customers are the most valuable. Research shows that acquiring a new customer may cost five to seven times more than retaining an old one. What’s more, 59% of American consumers claim that once they become loyal to a brand, they remain loyal to it for life. This is impressive data, isn’t it?

A customizable and smart offer management platform offers a unique advantage – targeting brand champions with personalized and exclusive deals to make them come back every time. You can use offer management software to design, build, and implement well-thought-out loyalty programs that will improve customer retention and drive your sales.

7. Be creative

With a tailored offer management platform, you should be able to create any type of offer that comes to your mind and can serve as an attractive incentive to your customers. What is more, with the right technology, you can combine various kinds of promotions in one campaign or allow offer stacking.

If you are buzzing with creative ideas and scenarios on how to gamify your promotions and motivate your users to redeem your offers, offer management software is bound to help you make these ideas come real and bring tangible benefits. Coupling marketer-friendly and well-designed backend with imaginative frontend of your own branding that appeals to your audience is a recipe for promotional success.

How to choose the right offer management platform for your ecommerce business?

There are a couple of factors to consider when choosing offer management software that suits your needs best and will help you create an outstanding shopping experience for your customers. By carefully evaluating these aspects, you can make an informed decision and choose promotions management software that will support your marketing and sales objectives.

1. Think of your goals

Before making a decision about integrating your ecommerce store with an offer management platform, determine your business objectives and assess your requirements. Specify your particular needs, from financial goals to brand image aspects. Do you want to focus on customer loyalty, issuing multiple and seasonal digital coupons, or perhaps your needs are complex, so the tool must combine a variety of purposes?

2. Review the available functionalities

Analyze all the options offered by the solutions you are considering and pay attention to what you actually need and want to achieve through them. You may think of the following aspects and requirements:

• Intuitive, marketer-friendly dashboard.
• Possibility of creating various types of promo campaigns and discounts.
• Basic promotion functionalities (validation, redemption, management).
• Various promotion limits (based on the product, order, customer, time, location, budget).
• Digital wallets and customer cockpits.
• Omnichannel distribution possibilities.
• Analytics and reporting components.
• Real-time offer updates.
• Branding and customization.
• Targeting and personalization.

Any particular use case that comes to your mind as potentially necessary should be checked against the offer management system you are taking into account.

3. Remember about scalability

In the ever-changing business environment, the scalability and flexibility of the solution you use is a key characteristic and necessity. Depending on your needs and capabilities, as well as the dynamic customer expectations, you may need to scale your budget and the performance of your offers. Make sure the tool you choose is able to be scaled along with your brand so that the possible market fluctuations don’t affect your ROI, while your growth is supported by the offer management tool you decide on.

4. Make room for customization

One of the crucial aspects to determine is the level and availability of customization options in the offer management platform. You need to evaluate if the offer management software can be tailored to align with your brand identity and requirements to create unique offers and maintain consistent branding. The right level of customization will allow you to ensure great user experience both for the marketers using the software and the customers redeeming your offers.

5. Take integration and implementation into account

There is a saying that never gets old: time is money. Implementing an existing and customizable offer management platform is surely much less time-consuming than building one from scratch or using a rigid out-of-the-box solution which may be quick to buy but will cause one roadblock after another. Find out about the deployment process and time of the system you are thinking of. Also, check if it is easy to use for your marketing team as well as compatible with other software you use. Seamless integration with key tools, plugins, and engines is an important factor to bear in mind.

Voucherify as Offer Management Software

Voucherify is an all-in-one offer management platform and a promotion engine that will help you at every step of the promotion lifecycle. Its API-first infrastructure is ready to turn simple coupon campaigns into intelligent and secure offers that will supercharge your marketing efforts in no time.

Here are some offer ideas you can create with Voucherify:

• Cart-level promotions.
• Promo codes.
• Gift cards.
• Loyalty programs.
• Referral programs.
• Giveaways.
• Bundling.
• Cashback.

And here are some of the numerous features of Voucherify that make it a practical and multipurpose offer management tool that optimizes the marketing team’s workflow:

• High level of offer personalization possibilities.
• Easy coupon code generation alongside advanced voucher settings and properties.
• Various redemption options, criteria, and settings.
• Customizable rewards and tiers.
• Practical use of metadata and customer attributes for better segmentation and improved user experience.
• Possibility of using custom events as promotional triggers.
• Cross-channel offer distribution.
• Geolocation-based campaigns.
• Fraud prevention options, including double opt-in and blocking email aliases.
• Full trackability of the offers.
• Backend solutions that can be fully adapted to your own frontend choices.
• Integration with a number of leading CRM, CDP, and CMS systems.
• Data security and legal compliance.

Voucherify is a great composable tool for marketers set to build creative and efficient campaigns without any setback that can slow down their strategic activities in the fast-paced ecommerce world.

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