Offer Management Platform – What Is It and What Benefits It Brings?

In 2016, 126.8 million U.S. consumers used coupons online. This number is projected to grow to 145.3 million users in 2021. As customers avoid visiting stores sticking to social distancing rules, e-commerce has taken off, and so did online promotions. Yet, it is not difficult to run promotions. The trick is to turn them into 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. As a result, marketers are unwilling to try new media and tools that would further complicate promotions. Luckily, there is a solution. 

What is an Offer Management Platform (OMP)?

Offer management platform is a designated offer management software that helps marketers manage, distribute, secure, and track digital offers. With a dedicated offer management software, you get to control your offers throughout their entire lifecycle.

Using offer management software, you can release offers, automate their delivery across digital channels, redeem them at checkout, and create easily updatable 360° customer profiles that let you design more personalized and more intelligent offers with each new campaign. Besides control over how your offers will play out, you also get to secure your offers better by reducing unnecessary spending and fraud risk.

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

Now, let’s see what benefits come with using offer management platforms.

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 a 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 but also against internal communication mishaps by establishing proper access workflow.

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. Here are just a few of them:

• Short expiration dates.
• Targeting. 
• Geo-targeted codes.
• More secure ways of distributing codes. 
  

But that’s not enough. In 2015, coupon fraud constituted 15% of all fraudulent customer activity, which is predicted to grow. How can offer management software help then? 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 fear that customers would 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.

Gain valuable insights

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

Become better at segmentation

The customer base is arguably the most valuable collection 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’ needs and expectations. 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, what are their preferences, interests, and other characteristic crucial to earning their trust and engagement. 

Build customer loyalty

We can all agree that loyal customers are the most valuable. Marketing gurus constantly repeat that acquiring a new consumer may be associated with up to 5 times higher costs than keeping those who already bought from you. Impressive, right? Offer management platform (OMP) offers a unique advantage – targeting brand champions with personalized and exclusive deals to make them come back every time. 

Offer Management Software — Voucherify

Voucherify is an all-in-one offer management platform and a promotion engine that will help you at every step of a promotion lifecycle. Our API-first infrastructure is ready to turn simple coupon campaigns into intelligent and secure offers that will supercharge your marketing efforts in no-time. Join over 200 satisfied customers and get the most value out of your offers. 

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