Promotions have long been a fundamental aspect of business success — but it’s only becoming more the case as competition heats up. With ever-emerging eCommerce companies fighting for the hot spot, your use of promotions can make or break your business efforts.
A robust promotional strategy provides you with an exciting opportunity to leave your fiercest competitors in the dust. All you need to do is understand exactly which promotions are on offer and what each can do for your company.
To help you achieve this, we’re going to consider the different promotions available and how each can take your company into 2024 and beyond.
Suggested reading: The Ultimate Guide to Using Promo Codes in eCommerce Strategy. Discover new ways to use promo codes, discount vouchers and coupons in your eCommerce strategy, so that you can target the right people at the right time.
What are promo codes?
“Promo code” is the term you’ll hear and use most often in your eCommerce-focused promotional efforts. Put simply, a promo code is an alphanumeric sequence, often personalised, that consumers can use to redeem money off purchases online or in-store.
Also commonly referred to as discount codes, voucher codes, and coupon codes, businesses can either send codes like these directly to consumers, or implement them into QR barcodes (though, there’s plenty of other options available too.) Promo codes traditionally take the form of either percentages or various amounts of money and can apply to both individual purchases and complete orders.
In many ways, promo codes are the umbrella of the promotional world. They offer an overarching promotional strategy, vital in an age where consumers are being squeezed by the cost of living crisis and expect retailers to provide them with discounts.
Recent research reveals that 92% of shoppers regularly seek out coupon and discount codes. 82% of US consumers said they search for an online coupon code nearly every time they purchase online.
Promo codes can help you to meet customer expectations and boost your eCommerce business moving forward.
Tip: By monitoring your competitors’ promo code requests and offering more attractive discounts or terms for products, you can attract new customers and foster loyalty. Customers particularly like to be served exclusive, personalised promotional codes with 68% saying they are more likely to engage with brands that offer this.
Coupons vs. Vouchers
Within, yet slightly separate to the promo code umbrella, are coupons and vouchers. Each utilises promotional codes in slightly different ways. Understanding these nuances and testing the different formats will help you identify those that work best for your unique business model.
Discount vouchers
Discount vouchers typically pass from a retailer straight to consumers. Taking the form of emails, gift cards and even loyalty cards, vouchers can be used as rewards, compensation, and more. While mainly providing one-time discounts, vouchers tend to work on a depletion basis, encouraging repeat purchases if money remains.
Coupons
Coupons are generally distributed by either a marketing team or an independent reservation. Unlike the depletable nature of some vouchers, coupons tend to cover one-time purchases on things like food and drinks or retail items. In contrast to discount vouchers, companies often use online or printable coupons to attract new audiences. Much like offering a free sample, coupons can be used to encourage first-time purchases that lead to repeat custom.
Applying these differences to your bottom line
Once you understand the fundamental differences between vouchers and coupons and how promo codes fit within that, you can start to apply these methods to improve your bottom line.
Vouchers tend to be relatively easy to deliver since you can utilize your existing customer base and send them via email etc. Naturally you can’t simply send blank promo codes.
Consider creative ways to use artwork and personalisation within your promotional emails or cards, to dress vouchers in a way that both appeals and increases conversions.
Coupons generally involve a much broader reach. While presentation still matters, you also need to focus on marketing techniques that include social media efforts, and connections with third-party sites.
Engaging with influencers can boost your chances of success with coupons. By providing coupons for influencers to share with their audiences, you can enjoy the power of personalisation with audiences that are more likely to buy from you.
The importance of implementing single-use promo codes
When it comes to both coupons and vouchers, it’s essential to consider using single-use codes instead of generic offerings. Single-use efforts can help you to eliminate promo code misuse on even your wide-scale coupon efforts.
This is especially significant given the recent 52% rise in promotion fraud experienced by online merchants. Single use codes remove the risk of giving away too much for free -and ensure only users you want to use your codes can do so.
- With an increased focus on personalisation, single-use promo codes can impress, or even evangelise your existing customer base, and help you reach a wider audience.
- Single-use codes make it easier to track and optimise your promotional campaigns. This applies whether you’re offering loyalty discounts or influencer codes, and based on your insights you can perfect and tailor your efforts moving forward.
- Single-use promotions in both coupon and voucher strategies, allow you to implement techniques like scarcity marketing, where diminishing or time-sensitive offers provide a much-needed incentive for conversions.
Case study: Beauty Bay - Exclusive Early Page Access
The Problem: Beauty Bay needed to reward existing customers and Nikkie Tutorial’s social followers with early access to their exclusive, collaborative eyeshadow palette before general release. They needed to create a bespoke, promotional journey for users to reward them for signing up (and keeping this early access perk exclusive only to users that had signed up in advance).
The Solution: Beauty Bay emailed out unique codes to those who had signed up for early access. Uniqodo helped them build and deploy a gate so that only these VIP users were able to unlock it, and access an early access window.
The Results: 87k new customer sign ups were generated prior to the campaign launch, and Beauty Bay saw an impressive 23% revenue uplift in promotion-related sales.
Maximise the impact of your promotions with a powerful promotion experience platform
Promotional codes, coupons, and vouchers are useful tools to help you boost your profits, and help you appeal to a wider customer base.
But to achieve real success with your promotions, it’s essential to use unique promotional codes in your campaigns.
Generating and distributing unique codes is easy using a promotion experience platform with the ability to generate promo codes for you automatically.
Uniqodo’s promotion software not only helps you generate a large number of unique single-use promo codes for your customer base, but enables you to monitor the effectiveness of your campaigns so that you can continually change and improve them.
Get in touch today to find out how Uniqodo can help to optimise your use of promo codes and boost your promotional marketing efforts.
1. 2023 Retail Trends Report: Consumer Coupon Usage
2. PromoCodius Unveils Findings From Survey on Promo Code Utilization in the US
3. Global Merchants Increase Spend to Tackle eCommerce Fraud Crisis
Subscribe to the Blog