5 eCommerce Promotion Strategies: Your Guide to Cracking Q4

Promotions have always been a valuable mainstay in eCommerce marketing but research shows that it’s more important than ever. Over 50% of millennials say they look for a deal before deciding where to purchase.¹ They may already know the specific product they want, but it’s the appeal of a deal that pushes them to buy from a particular retailer.

So, we know eCommerce promotions work. But how can you capitalise on the power of promotions to gain the most success for your business and create better ROI on your promotional campaigns that extend beyond the first purchase? The short answer: streamlining your promotional journeys.

Here’s what we’ll show you in this article to illustrate that:

• Five proven eCommerce customer acquisition promotion strategies for your brand and how to optimise them

• Ideas on how to use your online promotion strategy to create better customer journeys

• Real stories of the success that brands achieved with these tactics when partnering with Uniqodo

Let's get started with real-world examples of effective eCommerce promotion journeys…

1: Second purchase incentives

Second purchase incentives may be key to building up customer loyalty for your eCommerce stores beyond that initial interest, but their real value comes about in how they improve your customer journeys.

Customer journeys can and should stretch beyond the first purchase. Offering second purchase incentives is the most efficient way of extending the customer journey and increasing customer lifetime value overall.

How Uniqodo maximised TUI’s ROI through second purchase incentives

Challenge: The travel agency TUI came to Uniqodo with a problem: their customers are massively driven by price. The lowest price, therefore, nearly always wins. So, TUI wanted to offer valuable discounts to returning customers to build customer loyalty. This cuts out the competition and reduces the costs of acquiring new customers.

Solution: Uniqodo gave TUI the ability to issue unique codes to customers on their post-purchase page. Each code was based on customer data and connected to their email address. This kind of unique, customer-specific connection enabled email marketing to target repeat customers.

Plus, the code being tethered to a customer’s email meant that re-messaging was enabled once said customer logged into their account. This guaranteed that TUI’s promotion strategies could be realised immediately so that results could be achieved as quickly and efficiently as possible.

Result: TUI experienced a 10,282% return on investment, and because of this success, TUI expanded this program to build repeat purchases for seasonal travel offers, making it a business as usual (BAU) strategy.

2: Loyalty schemes

A loyalty scheme is another tried-and-true promotional tactic that’s worth readdressing through taking up different strategies. A key way to make them better is by thinking of how you can make your business more loyal to its customers first. Here are a few ideas to keep in mind:

• Trying out tiered discounts, giving bigger bonuses to someone as they reach higher levels of lifetime spend with you.

• Apply discounts automatically, instead of using vouchers or extra steps for the customer.

• Enable social conversations on your business through offering discounts if someone recommends your services, like offering a one-time deal when a friend joins the loyalty program.

The common denominator and success factor in all of these plans is that they tie back to improving your customer journeys and experiences. Loyalty schemes help extend customer journeys, increasing critical metrics like repeat purchases and customer lifetime value.

Maintaining a mutually beneficial relationship between your business and your customers is key to seeing better growth. That starts with, essentially, providing your customers benefits in the first place.

How Uniqodo helped build a loyalty program with unique, single-use coding for a more personalised experience

Challenge: N Brown Group — owners of brands such as Jacomo, JD Williams, and Fashion World — came to Uniqodo because their promotions were being leaked and overused, resulting in over-discounts, poor tracking, and an unworkable loyalty program.

Solution: Uniqodo set up unique codes for each shopper to create a more sophisticated and useful affiliate program. Then, a customer loyalty program rolled out to their SimplyBe program over six weeks. The strategy of the program was that customers would be provided with a personalised product selection upon signing up and would be given greater value discounts the more they shopped with SimplyBe.

This immediately incentivised customers to continue shopping with SimplyBe for the benefits of a personalised eCommerce experience, with the additional perk of more valuable discounts.

Result: Here’s what Sian Worthington, their Affiliate Strategy Manager, said about the results:

"The beauty of Uniqodo - it was very easy to implement on our website, and they made it easy to create new campaigns and add new tools. I can go to Uniqodo with problems we're facing, and they will come up with solutions for us."

3: Create exclusivity and buzz with unique products

Rare items are more valuable than standard ones. So, create a unique feeling of a rarity for your customers, and they will buy more. Creating exclusive offers means giving some customers the ability to purchase something no one else can or before everyone else has a chance. Think of the people queuing up outside Apple stores before an iPhone launch — back when that was special. Being first matters to customers.

Instead of passing out tents, sleeping bags, and bottled water, use unique codes to generate the same feeling of exclusive or early access. Be sure to keep the process of getting those codes aligned with your business goals, like through signing up for your email list, purchasing a product, or sharing a message on social media. Doing so factors back into adding to the value of your customer journeys and giving you an inside look into what methods work better than others.

How Uniqodo generated thousands of new signups for Beauty Bay through an exclusive gate

Challenge: Beauty Bay got in touch with Uniqodo because their collaboration with NikkieTutorials was coming soon. They knew specific products were going to sell out. They needed a way to reward social followers with early access before general release.

Solution: Uniqodo helped them generate and email out unique codes to customers that signed up for early access to the launch. They then built and implemented a gated area on the Beauty Bay website that could be unlocked with the emailed codes, creating an early access window for the customers who signed up. This enabled a highly-rewarding and bespoke experience for the customers, incentivising them to look out for potential future exclusive offers.

Result: The campaign generated 87,000 new signups and a 23% uplift in sales connected to this promotion.

4: Timed offers/flash sale

Timed offers and flash sales generate demand and create urgency by offering discounts for a specific period. People are used to timed offers because they’ve been happening for decades.

Try out a diminishing discount when looking to run a timed offer or sale. 30% off in the next 24 hours, 20% off the next day, and 10% off.

To tie these offers back to your customer journeys, factor them into their real-time shopping experiences to make them more engaging with your business. Methods like engaging email formats help drive the exclusivity of a promotion, while adding a flash sale pop-up to shopping carts massively reduces cart abandonment.

How Uniqodo helped Travelodge increase their number of booking in a single week through timed offers

Challenge: Travelodge contacted Uniqodo to help them with their Autumn Sale. The competitive travel market meant overused discount codes really harmed promotions.

Solution: Uniqodo built a system where Travelodge could advertise their Autumn Sale — a timed offer — but connect valuable discounts of up to 30% for their most valuable customers. They could also vary the discount by hotel to drive traffic to their most valuable opportunities.

Multiple marketing channels were used to drive awareness, from emails to paid online searches. The Uniqodo Canvas overlay functionality also proved useful in delivering onsite messaging for users researching hotels and dates relevant to the sale. Validation rules were implemented to control which users saw which discount codes to prevent misuse, and drive business where it was most needed.

Result: Using this system, Travelodge scored the highest volume of bookings in a single trading week.

Maryke Lotz, Travelodge Manager for Partnerships and Affiliates, said:

"We've been working with Uniqodo for about twelve months, and each campaign we do is getting more targeted. Working with Uniqodo has significantly accelerated our campaign capability."

5: Single-use codes increase personalisation and control

Unique, one-time-use discount codes make a transaction more personal. Customers with unique codes want to get their special deals, and, in turn, you run a secure and controlled promotion that is leak-proof and protects your marketing budget by ensuring promotions only get in front of the audience you want to target and are likely to repeat-purchase.

Single-use codes help in preventing a misuse of promotions and potential losses for your business. They ensure that a code can only be used once so that no user can benefit from getting repeat discounts or leak the code online to those who don't fit the target audience for the promotion.

With that said, you can also work them to your advantage whilst improving your customer journeys. You can link one-time use codes to sharing buttons to help friends get discounts with a new unique code. Another strategy that can be implemented includes creating sharing incentives. When three friends redeem a code, you get a different discount code. This improves business while also giving your customers incentive to bring in new buyers and pay attention to your promotional offers.

Single-use codes are also brilliant for offering customers a curated purchase experience — "Look what we found for you." They also work well with available offers as a contrast. So, if you're running a standard 10% off sale, then a loyal customer might get a 20% secure, single-use discount code for sale items, providing them with an exclusive, unique experience. This kind of effective tactic comes from using customer data to understand their buying habits, so that you can create offers that are more likely to make them convert.

How EE secured their codes with Uniqodo

Challenge: EE came to Uniqodo because their latest rebranded employee benefits scheme — EE Perk — was being a large administrative burden. EE Perk offered a 20% discount to business clients whose staff registered for the program, which could then be passed on to five friends or family members. This offer was also made available to EE employees.

Solution: Uniqodo streamlined the sign-up process to EE Perk by designing and coding an extra layer to the system that enabled EE to structure how these multi-use codes were being allocated to each client. Rather than losing time in admin upkeep, EE are now able to generate large batches of single-use codes on an ad-hoc basis, all with the guarantee of security. This enabled a greater response rate to existing and potential clients that signed up to the program, keeping the cycle of EE Perk customers growing.

Result: The former EE Perk platform took two people up to ten days of work to make product changes and pricing updates on over 1,500 partners' multi-use codes. With Uniqodo, EE can instantly make changes, removing more than 95% of the administration overhead.

Let’s wrap it up

Promotions and offers work beyond providing incentives for your customers to buy from you in the first place — they’re crucial in giving you insights into your customer journeys, starting from their promotion experiences. Those very insights are what help you drive sales, understand what leads work for gaining potential customers, and creating better shopping experiences for your customers overall. At least when those promotions are done right.

When you’re ready to level up your promotion abilities, book a demo at Uniqodo. We’ll show you how to win and start writing your success story now.

¹ New Study Shows Deals and Promotions Affect Every Part of Shopping Experience | Inc.com