Coupon codes can be a powerful tool to incentivize shoppers to make a purchase. But what happens when more discounted purchases than you budgeted for are being made? This can happen when a customer shares one of your coupon codes on a deal site and the code is distributed to people outside of your typical audience.
You may be thinking, “That’s great! More sales is a good thing!” If you’re making more sales with a hefty discount, you’re making less of a profit and are still having to fulfill orders using the same resources. Most eCommerce platforms allow you to generate and upload randomized bulk coupon codes into your store to distribute via emails for one-time-use-only, but managing and tracking these codes is often no more sophisticated than your standard spreadsheet. Automating these coupon codes into your triggered emails can be even more difficult.
Thinking in these terms, it’s no wonder many of our customers asked us to build a way to use these one-of-a-kind discount codes and track them alongside their general discount codes so everything is streamlined and easy-to-analyze. With our new Unique Coupon Codes feature, our customers can easily personalize discount codes by offering an individualized coupon code in the triggered emails of their choice.
Unique Coupon Code Best Practices:
- Don’t train your customers to abandon a cart just to receive a discount code. If you include a discount in the first Abandoned Cart Email, it can lead to customers abandoning their cart every time they want to make a purchase from your store. The key is to incentivize new customers to make their first purchase by offering a discount but not train your current customers to abandon a cart just so they get a promo code. To achieve this, we suggest setting up a series of 2-3 emails as follows:
- A 3-Hour Abandoned Cart email and sending this to everyone who abandons their cart. This is just your initial reminder to let all site visitors know that they have items in their cart. No need to include a promo code here!
- An email that’s scheduled 2-3 days after the initial abandonment has occurred and filter it to go to customers who have purchased at least once before. Make sure you change the Email Subject Line and copy to differ from the original 3-Hour Abandoned Cart Email. No promo code needed!
- A similar 2-3 Day Abandoned Cart Email that is filtered to go to everyone else who has not made a purchase on your website before. This is the email that should include a promotion and link to your unique coupon code. Make sure you change the Email Subject Line and copy to differ from the original 3-Hour Abandoned Cart Email.
You can then opt to include a set of individualized coupon codes you’ve created in your eCommerce platform, and we’ll automatically distribute them in your emails as customers abandon their carts.
- Personalize your triggered emails for each customer segment you want to target. You don’t have to send the same triggered email to everyone who abandons a cart in your store. Set up multiple triggered emails with different messaging to go to specific customer segments within your store.
- Clean up your codes with customized prefixes. When generating a bulk list of coupons through your eCommerce platform, assign a custom prefix to your discount codes to make them less overwhelming for your customers. For example, you could name a set of coupons for a Win-Back triggered email “WelcomeBack” so that the coupons will look something like “WelcomeBack985S2H1” instead of “J874GN91MMS”.
Discount codes aren’t right for every store, but if they are a part of your strategy you have the opportunity to choose exactly who receives them and greater understanding of the conversions that result from them. Whether you’re looking to gain more control over your discount strategy or you want more personalization opportunities for your triggered emails, our Unique Coupon Codes feature is a simple way to organize your efforts and make sense of the data.
Ready to use Unique Coupon Codes to personalize your discount code strategy in time for the holidays? Message us at marketing@springbot.com for more details!