Both online and on the high-street, the competition is fierce. Increasingly, brands are turning to promo code campaigns as a way to cut through the competition. But not every campaign will deliver the same ROI. What’s the secret to successful promotional marketing?
In an age where 75% of consumers expect discounts and the vast majority of companies offer them, opting for a standard-fare promo code campaign will never help you stand out from the crowd. It certainly won’t pull the conversion rates you need for ROI! In fact, a cookie-cutter, large-scale coupon campaign could do more damage than good to your brand awareness and perceived product value.
Of course, bigger promotions can be more compelling, but only when done right. Everything from your wording to your marketing strategy needs to be tailor-made for results. Here, we’re going to deliver you a breakdown on how to use promo codes to maximum effect and deliver the ROI you need in 2023.
Use single-use promo codes
Issues like promo code misuse incited by generic code implementations have risen by 217% in the last year alone, and are guaranteed to continue increasing into 2020. That’s sure to cost you and keep you clear of that ever-coveted ROI. Fear of code misuse could also limit the discount codes you offer. Yet, this is a concern you can do away with altogether by instead utilising single-use promo codes.
Single-use codes are one-time discounts, often directed to specific shoppers, that make misuse a thing of your past. Such codes are easier to track, monitor, and generally restrict. Of course, these benefits themselves don’t automatically lead to ROI increases. Single-use code generation can be a logistical nightmare if you don’t approach this matter in the right way. Before you know, the extra workload created could flush your ROI as badly as code misuse before it.
Luckily, one simple solution can help you overcome those risks — single-use, unique code software. By investing in a product that automates and simplifies single-use generation, you bring both ease and security to your marketing campaigns. And, finally, you should be able to enjoy the ROI you need as a result.
Personalise & target conversions
Personalising and targeting conversions is always best for ROI. In fact, 79% of consumers are only likely to use a discount coupon that’s uniquely tailored towards their history/experiences with a company.
Lucky for you, you’re operating in a time where big data allows you to understand more about your consumers than ever before. Through the use of cookies, analytics, and so forth, you can understand everything there is to know, including:
- What interests them (and which discounts will appeal)
- Which products they like
- When they do their online shopping
- What’s stopping them from making a sale (shipping costs, competition, etc.)
By using automated software to target coupons towards things like browsing history, shopping cart abandonment and more, you can provide single-use offerings guaranteed to pique interest. Over time, you should even find that the fact you notice these trends and offer discounts around consumer needs can significantly help you foster loyal customers, thus increasing ROI further!
Craft promotions for specific outcomes
ROI often comes down to the outcomes you aim towards with promotional codes. Keeping a specific and tangible end goal in mind can help you to tailor discounts and track progress. There are a few different outcomes worth keeping in mind, and they include:
Customer loyalty
As we’ve touched on, garnering customer loyalty through offers can go a long way towards a lasting ROI. Personalisation is certainly one way to achieve this, but you can take your efforts even further by advancing discounts with techniques such as:
- Gamification — Gamification discounts are all about making offers fun for consumers. For customer loyalty, you could provide gamification discounts that give 10% off if they buy an item from each of their favourite shop sections. This provides a fun incentive, as well as showing consumers that you pay attention to tastes and needs.
- Word of mouth incentives — 90% of consumers trust, and would purchase from, peer recommendations. That means using coupons to encourage existing customers to recommend you could work wonders. Gamification can play a role here by encouraging customers to recommend ten friends for 50% off, etc. Equally, mystery rewards for recommendations can work fantastically.
Customer acquisition
Even though acquisition costs an average of 5 times more than retention, 44% of companies put greater emphasis here when it comes to ROI. And, it’s easy to see why, given that acquiring more customers means increased profits now and moving forward. As well as acquiring new customers through word of mouth, fast-forward your efforts here by focusing on:
- Influencer marketing — 54% of browsers now seek brand recommendations from social media. By providing personalised coupon codes to big-name influencers, companies can, therefore, appeal to brand new audiences, all while tracking results and benefiting from a pretty much guaranteed ROI.
- Scarcity discounts — Even when we’re new to a brand, scarcity discounts will encourage us to make purchases faster. Diminishing discounts and time-sensitive offers can incentivise new consumers to buy without thought. And, once they start browsing, they may turn into loyal customers for the ROI you’re after.
Upselling and cross-selling
If you want to bolster the ROI behind campaign efforts, you need to sell as much as possible. Discounts are useful for getting consumers onto your site, but it’s down to you to tailor offers towards upselling and cross-selling for the most substantial possible profits.
Obviously, advertising things like related products can help, but even your promo code campaigns can bolster upselling and cross-selling efforts. Offering free shipping on orders over a certain amount can work well too. Equally, techniques like gamification where discounts rise dependent on spending can be a fantastic incentive to buy more.
Shopping cart abandonment
Shopping cart abandonment impacts 75.6% of companies, and tailoring offers here can go a long way towards helping you achieve the ROI you’d otherwise lose. Given that 25% of abandonments happen because consumers are unhappy with final prices, offering free shipping can be especially useful for encouraging consumers to complete their orders.
Many companies also find that scarcity techniques like limited time codes in post-abandonment email marketing efforts work well. Suddenly, consumers who wanted to ‘browse’ have an incentive to buy with you sooner rather than later, thus ensuring ROI lands with you rather than your competitors.
Think long-term about ROI
ROI is, undeniably, a useful metric for promo code implementation, but this goal spans further than initial purchases. As we’ve touched upon in nearly every point, ROI comes down to long-term customer loyalty as much as it does your initial campaigns.
As such, your promo codes may already be doing more for long-term ROI than you realise. Even if you take slight losses on initial discounts upfront, efforts like personalisation and others mentioned guarantee that consumers keep shopping with you time and again. Rather than focusing on promo code results, then, spread your net. Instead, consider the campaigns that create the most ongoing sales, then focus your efforts towards these for ROI you know works well moving forward.
Promo code ROI comes down to efficiency and purpose
When you look at these ROI-boosting strategies, on the whole, two main takeaways keep arising again and again: efficiency and purpose. To determine whether ROI is possible at all, you need to first consider the efficiency and results created by campaigns. By tracking progress this way, you can be sure to tailor future efforts towards techniques that are proven to bring the best results.
Purpose, too, is fundamental for promotion success. Cookie-cutter, generic offers simply don’t lead to ROI in modern markets. Instead, always consider personalising and tailoring single-use efforts towards specific goals that provide trackable results.
Both these ROI efforts are simpler than you’d think when paired with the implementation of a reliable promo code software that implements processes without slowing you down. As well as providing the results you need for trackable discounts, automated unique, single-use code generation means you never again need to work above and beyond to put purpose behind your efforts. As simple as that, ROI should be yours in 2020 and onwards.
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