Do you ever feel like your promo campaigns are out of your control? Does it keep you up at night, worrying about your marketing spending and its relative ROI? Looking at sales outcomes in the context of your broader goals is one thing, but the greater the number of metrics you make visible, the easier it is to see the big picture. The good news is that with the right tools, you can track your promotional marketing efforts with absolute granularity.
Promotion engines are extremely useful in a range of promotional and marketing strategies. They can often integrate with a range of analytics suites to put their users in the driver's seat. Users can not only track the success of their promotions in real time, they can access a wide range of performance metrics which can inform their promotional strategies, allowing them to stay ahead of the curve and invest their efforts in areas where they’re more likely to pay off.
Influencer marketing is still going strong in 2020 with new platforms like Tiktok giving savvy brands access to a new generation of up and coming content creators who could become tomorrow’s social influencers. Younger consumers care about what influencers have to say. In fact, 40% of millennial consumers believe that their favourite YouTube creators understand them better than their own friends.
Still, not all influencers are the best fit for your brand. There’s no way of knowing for sure that the influencers with the biggest platforms will create the most engagement with your brand. Unique codes can be attributed to different influencers so that brands can see which influencers are working the hardest for them and resulting in the most conversions.
When you partner unique single-use promo codes with reliable analytics, there’s practically limitless scope for experimentation. Users can identify which social channels result in the most referrals — but that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
Because unique promo codes are digitally and individually traceable, brands can gain granular insights into how they’re being used across multiple channels, allowing them to take risks, try new platforms, double down on the channels that get the most engagement and waste less time on channels that offer meagre conversion rates.
Different channels tend to appeal to consumers of different demographic makeups, so brands can use lookalike audiences to determine what kind of people are engaging with their promotions and where they spend their time online. This can create opportunities to try out different ad copy (each iteration with its own unique code) on different channels using nuances of images and language which are more aligned to the different demographic groups that use them.
Of course, changing ad copy across different channels in the middle of a promo campaign can be a risky endeavour. It might pay off with increased conversions, but it might alienate consumers and result in conversion rates nosediving.
Fortunately, when your promo engine gives you robust analytics capabilities, you can track different codes and A/B test different iterations of ad copy using different codes to find out which promotions resonate best with your target audience. This is a great way to free yourself up to experimentation while also mitigating your risks. If promotion B is gaining a lot more traction than promotion A, you know to discard promo A and incorporate what you’ve learned from promo B into a new iteration.
There’s nothing more frustrating than sending out promotional emails and getting no response. In today’s competitive landscape, however, consumers don’t just want promo codes delivered straight to their inbox. They want personalised promo codes which are tailored to their prior experience with your brands.
By tracking email engagement and leveraging data on prior transactions and promo engagements, brands can experiment with different iterations of promo emails and increase their chances of meaningful engagement.
A longer-lasting promotional window isn’t necessarily the one that will get brands the most engagement. In fact, if consumers believe that they have longer to access promo codes, they may be more likely to sit on their hands until the last minute.
With access to the right analytics, brands can gain insights into how quickly promo use is adopted and at what point it begins to diminish. This can allow them to replace codes that aren’t seeing the same level of engagement with new ones which may be more appealing.
Users can also experiment with scarcity marketing techniques and implement time limits for promo code use or diminishing discount strategies which reward early birds. Because they can see which promotional periods gain the most engagement from consumers, brands can waste less time on promotions that are failing to gain traction.
When promotions are intentionally misused or spammed it can have a significant impact on your campaign performance metrics. Even when you have great visibility of your promotional code use on a granular level, it can be hard to determine which codes were used by genuine customers, the kind who are likely to come back to your brand, and which have been misused.
The great thing about unique single-use promo codes is that they are just that: single-use. As a result, you don’t need to worry about code spamming obscuring the visibility of your promotions’ performance.
No brand wants to find out too late that its promotions are failing. By leveraging the right promo engines and keeping a close eye on their analytics, brands can take a much more agile and proactive approach to their promotional marketing. They can discard promotions that are lagging quickly while gaining a better understanding of what makes high performing promotions work and where to put them.