Promotion Engines and Uniqodo's Promotion Experience Platform: The winning formula to supercharge the performance of promotions

Promotional marketing is a uniquely effective tool that, when used correctly, can significantly boost both sales and brand awareness.

Even simple promotions like coupons can have a significant impact, with coupon users spending an average of 46% more at checkout than regular shoppers and 34% of millennial internet users looking for online coupons on a weekly basis.^1,2

However, more and more companies are realising that perfecting the customer experience can massively boost the impact of promotional marketing, attracting new customers, increasing conversions, and turning customers into brand evangelists. Sounds like a dream, right? 

More than 50% of businesses are now redirecting capital towards customer experience innovations.³ Promotions are key to customer experience, and in order to deliver really great eCommerce promotions, online retailers utilise some key technology to manage and deploy promotions to convert their customers. 

Typically, online retailers will invest in promotion engines; these are software products designed to automate the distribution and redemption of personalised promotional offerings to shoppers based on set criteria.

But in a post-Covid world, the expectation on customer experience and smooth, seamless customer journeys is higher than ever. A huge number of leading retail brands are investing heavily in conversion optimisation technologies. 

And whilst there are many of our friends in the industry that help convert customers onsite, there is only one tech solution which augments the capabilities of the brand’s promotion engine and delivers slick, frictionless journeys for promotions:

• Uniqodo’s Promotion Experience Platform: This takes the existing promotion capabilities by streamlining journeys to create exemplary customer experiences that increase conversion and engagement across the entire customer lifecycle.

A promotion engine will allow for discount codes or links to be issued across any of the brand’s marketing channels (affiliate, CRM, on site, paid search, paid social), the codes are entered into a code field and this then applies changes to the price or package. This is a tremendous way of delivering better conversion by incentivising new and/or existing customers into making a decision. 

A promotion engine is also great because it automates and streamlines processes for the brand’s eCommerce and marketing teams more generally. But, when combining a promotion engine with a strict focus on customer experience… Well, that revolutionary approach can completely supercharge how customers engage with promotions, and deliver amazing ROI. That’s where Uniqodo comes in. The Promotion Experience Platform does just that — it enhances promotion automation in light of extensive behavioural data and customer experience strategies to deliver a more holistic online promotion journey that engages customers like no other. 

In this article, we’ll be looking at the difference between a promotion engine working on its own and what happens to the performance of promotions when you combine it with the Promotion Experience Platform to yield exceptional results. Let’s get going… 

Suggested reading: Interested in how Promotion Experience Platforms fit into the wider sphere of promotional marketing? Find out now by reading Promotional Marketing vs Promotion Experience.

Promotion Engines are vital to promotion success

The benefit of the promotion engine is right there in the name, it powers your promotional marketing efforts. Well-executed promotional marketing campaigns are complicated beasts that, if implemented manually, can be hugely time-consuming. 

Promotion engines use automation to cover the basic tasks of implementing promotional marketing campaigns, such as personalising customer offers based on purchase history, distributing the campaign across a huge range of channels, validating redemptions and tracking campaign performance to allow for greater optimisation.

This kind of automation benefits companies of all scales, freeing up skilled staff from basic data entry tasks, reducing the potential for human error, and extending a campaign’s reach to even the most stubborn customers.

Some world-class examples of promotion engines include:

Talon.One: 

Talon.One offers a comprehensive data-driven promotion engine solution. 

• The Campaign Manager function allows marketers to set and automate budgets, build campaign rules based on customer data and create custom events — finally a party unaffected by social distancing!
• Talon.One’s Rule Engine creates completely automated workflows for a variety of campaigns, including coupon-based incentives, discount and price adjustments, loyalty programs and sales. 
• The engine’s flexible distribution design comes with a huge range of pre-built integrations for commonly used marketing platforms and CRM tools, creating one centralised system that is easier and more intuitive to use.

Voucherify: 

Voucherify allows companies to personalise their promotional campaigns with a dynamic promotion engine that offers different promotion types based on customer profiles. 

• The platform is able to quickly and effectively integrate with most marketing stacks, Voucherify uses a dev-friendly API, multiple SDKs, and custom webhooks to both reduce the time needed to manage a campaign and supercharge its results. 
• Using Voucherify empowers companies to offer advanced promotions with redemption policies that reflect their promotional strategy, as well as providing the necessary data and analytics to track and optimise campaigns for best results.  

Both Talon.One and Voucherify (in case you haven’t clocked) are excellent examples of promotion engines, but in the spirit of perpetual improvement, is there a way to supercharge their outcomes? Well… Yes. Let’s look first at why you might choose to augment your engine, how to do so, and what benefits your business will experience. 

Why is a Promotion Engine alone not enough?

Promotion engines are the vital workhorses of your campaign, and trust us, you need one. But, without an added focus on customer experience, you won’t fully maximise your promotional success. Promotions are a delicate art, if they’re not personalised, informed and timely they won’t be as effective as possible. 

But, what actually constitutes an exceptional customer experience? 

• Reliability: If you make a promise with your promotion and you can’t deliver on it, for any reason, then you’ll start losing customers (no duh?). Make reliability a key factor in creating an exceptional customer experience, or you’ll regret it.
• Simplicity: If access to your promotions or code redemption is difficult, or adds too many steps to the customer journey, they just won’t use it, simple as.
• Personalisation: Customers are increasingly interpreting personalisation as the hallmark of an effective marketing strategy as it makes them feel individually valued, rather than just a metric. 
• Understanding: In order to create an engaging personalised customer experience, you first need to understand your customers, which is why sophisticated behavioural analytics are so vital. 
• Tracking: Not all promotional campaigns are going to be a winner, which is why understanding the effectiveness of a particular campaign is critical. Tracking distribution, redemption and redundancy allows companies to stop pouring resources into campaigns that aren’t working and focus on those that are.

Promotional engines excel at running campaigns, but, on their own, they aren’t able to deliver an amazing customer experience in the way The Promotion Experience Platform can. But what is this mysterious platform I hear you ask? Sit back, buckle your seatbelt and let’s get to it. 

The Promotion Experience Platform: 

How does it augment promotion engines?

The Promotion Experience Platform (Uniqodo’s brainchild) is not a replacement for promotional engines. Rather it’s the missing piece of the marketing puzzle that augments a promotion-engine-managed campaign and extends it to new heights.

The end goal of any promotional campaign is to provide an exceptional customer experience, while a promotional engine allows companies to run campaigns effectively and efficiently, adding in The Promotion Experience Platform offers a whole new range of benefits, including:

• Maximised conversion: The Promotion Experience Platform allows businesses to take a holistic view of the customer experience, identifying and solving pain points that otherwise would impact basket conversions.
• Incentivised retention: Using data-crafted customer personas, The Promotion Experience Platform automates the distribution of offers to those demographics that are most likely to return to purchase more, increasing the impact of promotional campaigns.
• Advanced promotions: Most customers see the same basic promotions a hundred times a day. The Promotion Experience Platforms allow for the use of more complex advanced promotions, such as diminishing discounts, time-based promotions, mystery wheels, and custom landing pages to attract and engage customers. 
• Sophisticated targeting: The complex data-driven algorithms used by promotion experience platforms ensure that the right promotion is delivered to the right customer at the right time, massively increasing its impact. 
• Ease of integration: Using a simple tag integration The Promotion Experience Platform easily integrates with existing marketing stacks, reducing the dev time needed to get them up and running. 
• Access to unparalleled expertise: The market-leading Promotion Experience Platform from the lab at Uniqodo, offers unparalleled access to experienced engineers and client success professionals who offer companies the expertise gained in designing and deploying promotions for leading global brands.

Augment your promotion engine today with Uniqodo’s Promotion Experience Platform

Taken together, promotion engines and customer experience strategies supercharge promotional marketing campaigns. And Uniqodo’s Promotion Experience Platform does just that, refocusing on customer experience advocacy to automate promotion distribution, improve customer targeting and streamline journeys. The platform offers:

1) Incentives that motivate

Use Uniqodo’s powerful platform and data analytics to deploy personalised and gamified promotions that create a sense of urgency that drives frequency of use and increases the opportunities to up-sell and cross-sell while increasing average order value (AOV) and protecting margins.

2) Crafted experiences that drive action from your audiences

Using first-party data gathered about your business and through your promotion engine, Uniqodo produces customised builds that implement promotional messaging, exclusive and early access offers, and exit-intent popups to drive actions from your customers and increase conversion and retention.

3) A uniquely connected journey

The use of Uniqodo’s platform gives customers a uniquely holistic view of their promotional marketing campaigns, allowing for the deployment of click-to-reveal offers and interstitial advertising pages.

These deployments are underpinned by the use of 3rd party codes, CSV batch codes, onsite issuance, and simple but powerful API integration to offer your customers a fully connected and personalised journey from the point they receive their offer to the moment they finalise their purchase. 

To find out more about how Uniqodo’s market-leading promotion experience platform can bring all these benefits to your current marketing stack, book your demo today

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