If you’ve invested in a promotions engine like Uniqodo (or are considering doing so), chances are it’s because you’re after better performance and ROI out of your promotional campaigns.
However, while we find many businesses understand the value that features like single-use unique codes and software integrations offer, it’s some of Uniqodo’s more advanced capabilities that often make all the difference in achieving the results you’re after.
Although you might be able to find some of these capabilities within our competitors, keep in mind that a number of these support-focused features are unique to Uniqodo. With that out of the way, here are six different ways that Uniqodo can help you improve your promotional marketing outcomes.
1. Targeted and multi-stage validation
Standard promotional marketing strategies seek to influence customer behaviour by discounting the actions you want taken — and using set-rate discounts to achieve that. But, this is a limited approach.
For example, if you discount a slow-moving product to incentivise purchases, you're ignoring the fact that this product wasn't that popular in the first place — that discount will have limited appeal. Static discounts also lock you into a discount rate that might not be ideal when the discount is actually redeemed.
What Uniqodo delivers: Uniqodo lets you set up far more sophisticated validation criteria. To start with, you can create multi-stage criteria. For example, rather than discounting the product you want purchased, you could require the customer to purchase that product in order to get a discount for a more valuable product.
You can also create preset criteria around which discount rates will vary in real-time. For example, a hotel chain that’s offering discounts in order to help optimise capacity across a range of locations could dynamically control those discounts based on capacity on a location and time-sensitive basis. Uniqodo’s advanced targeting and validation allows you to present these criteria, and deliver those discounts dynamically based on latest trading data and availability.
2. Create a customer loyalty programme
According to Bain & Co, a 5% increase in customer retention can drive up to a 95% increase in profit. Needless to say, customer loyalty is a powerful tool for growth.
Promotional campaigns are a powerful tool to drive retention and profitability when implemented correctly in the right loyalty framework. For example, when used to design a promotional programme or system, discounts can be used to grow the average long-term value of each customer.
What Uniqodo delivers: The key to doing this well is knowing how to balance the cost of a discount and its value for your regular and most loyal customers. And Uniqodo can help you support key strategies and objectives within a loyalty framework, such as with:
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Loyalty codes, where discounts increase with each use.
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Exclusive “closed offers” to existing customers that provide controlled access to very steep discounts can be delivered using single-use, unique codes.
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Logged-in only codes, which is another example of controlling access to steep rewards.
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Unique codes to redeem rewards and offers issued as part of a loyalty programme (i.e. with partners).
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Unique codes to access gift cards (either brand or third party) as part of a reward system within a loyalty programme.
Uniqodo even makes the process of automating these things simple, since you have access to both our promotion marketing and development teams to help you strategise and implement the best approaches for your business (more on this later).
3. Engage with third parties
Partnerships are powerful for businesses in so many ways — they can lead to increased retention, acquisition, rewards, or engagement (to name a few advantages). Promotions can help incentivise a partner’s target market and then gauge the success of those campaigns. But standard promotional marketing tools often cannot be deployed as effectively within the context of those partnerships. You often lose control over your campaigns, and don’t have the ability to track them as needed.
However, instead of having to surrender control over the creation of discounts to your partners or using generic codes that risk being leaked or shared in places you didn’t intend (which can also disrupt partnership or other marketing activity), a promotion engine allows you full visibility and control over your campaigns.
What Uniqodo delivers: We built Uniqodo to make it easy to partner with third parties. Our permission-based access framework lets your partners generate their own single-use codes, while restricting control over the campaign’s parameters to your team:
This makes executing joint promotions significantly easier and more effective for everyone:
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It makes the issuance, validation and redemption of unique codes simple.
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It eliminates the need to use generic codes for your campaigns, preventing codes from leaking or being shared.
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It increases the amount of flexibility you have when working with partners to create truly unique and exclusive offers, without fear of code misuse. These codes can be distributed to partners via API integration or exporting/importing the codes.
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It eliminates the slew of administrative tasks that joint promotions typically require.
Furthermore, it also keeps all of your reporting in one place, making it easy to see what is actually working and what is not, allowing you to optimise campaigns on the fly for maximum value
4. A/B test your messaging and promotions
Success with promotional campaigns is all about knowing what works and what doesn’t. Specifically, being able to quantify that success (or lack thereof) with insights from data. Unique, single use codes make it possible to analyse those results on a promotion-specific, real-time basis.
What Uniqodo delivers: We built Uniqodo around a dashboard that pulls all of the data from your campaigns into a single place — and lets you segment in different ways. On top of that, we built the ability to A/B test, so you can test exactly what campaigns are working and what aren’t. It helps you actually see what is working and what you should focus on refining moving forward:
You can see overarching trends and hone in on success. And with A/B testing, if you change something in order to test a new approach, you’ll easily be able to see what effect it has on the outcomes you were trying to improve.
5. Get development support
Your business and customers are unique. So to get the most out of your promotions, you need a solution that can deliver customised outcomes (it’s why your CRM or eCommerce platform wasn’t getting the job done).
However, finding the right solution that gives you the level of customisation you need to drive these outcomes can unfortunately be a bit of a “catch-22”.
While building a custom solution from scratch would certainly give you the flexibility you need, it will require dedicated resources to maintain. A third-party off-the-shelf tool might deliver the outcomes you need today, but could also spiral into a development project in its own right when it doesn’t offer all the things you might need tomorrow.
What Uniqodo delivers: We designed Uniqodo to future-proof your promotional needs. It delivers off-the-shelf functionality that rivals all of our competitors. And we support our product with pay-as-you-use development service — allowing you to bring onboard the skills you need to deliver any bespoke outcome. Plus, we can build and deploy everything you need independently from your internal development teams, which has been one of the most valuable elements of working with Uniqodo for our clients. Fast, bespoke and robust solutions.
For example, a lot of brands find success dynamically displaying promotions on their website based on visitors taking a number of preset actions which indicate ideal targeting timing. Our dev team can help you build the code that allows you to customise where and how a discount overlay appears on your site.
Our whole service is designed around giving you the flexibility and control of a custom solution without the headaches associated with managing it yourself (managing and hiring developers, working out bugs, etc.).
Plus, you get access to our promotional marketing team as well.
6. Receive strategic advice
Developing the code to match your strategy and intended functionality is an important thing. But what about designing that promotional strategy in the first place? Just because you understand the value of promotions doesn’t mean that you already have a promotional marketing team.
What Uniqodo delivers: At Uniqodo, not only can we help you with the technical side of implementations, our promotional marketing team can provide strategic and tactical advice about the campaign approaches for your business too.
Think of us like one part software company, one part development team, and one part consulting firm. Our team has helped with some of the world’s best brands with their promotional campaigns. And we include access to that expertise with our software and development team.
As with all of our services, this is provided on-demand, and you don't pay a premium if you simply want the self-service options. But it’s a powerful option that's ready for you, when you need it.
So if you’re looking for help with improving promotional campaign strategy as it relates to your specific business outcomes, we’d be happy to sit down and talk it through with you. Check out our free eBook — The Ultimate Guide to Using Promo Codes — or just reach out here.
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