A promotions engine is a powerful tool that can be used to craft and execute targeted and customised promotional campaigns. Using automation, advanced validation criteria, and flexible distribution parameters, you can go far beyond the promotional marketing capabilities of a CRM or eCommerce platform.
But how do you make sure that you invest in the right piece of software?
There are quite a few options on the market. To be honest, all of them provide functional outcomes. But there are differences, and depending on your exact needs, different tools will serve you better.
Without further ado, let’s get started.
Suggested reading: Read our free eBook, ‘What Winning Your Promotional Strategy Looks Like’, to learn more about the development of successful promotions campaigns.
1. Uniqodo
Full disclosure: Uniqodo is our own platform — so we certainly believe it belongs at the top of this list. But that doesn’t mean it’s the only solution on the market. It’s simply the solution on the market that provides you with the most flexibility.
The stand-out feature of Uniqodo is that we go above and beyond what’s typically included in a promotion engine package. This not only means our promotion engine is one of the most powerful on the market, but also that it’s actually only part of the promotions software we offer. We provide you with an off-the-shelf Promotion Experience Platform that delivers advanced promotional capabilities and enhances your customers’ experiences.
Let’s find out exactly what this means.
The Promotion Experience Platform
Uniqodo has combined the benefits of promotion engines and promotion experiences to create a unique Promotion Experience Platform. This platform allows sites to implement creative and customisable single-use code campaigns while creating a seamless on-site experience. Just some of the ways in which promotions can be delivered include:
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Early access popups
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Custom landing pages
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Exit intent popups
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Onsite activation
Our platform is also backed up by on-demand consulting and development services that deliver bespoke onsite activation solutions. This means you can build promotional marketing campaigns tailored to your exact needs, all with the help of our expertise guiding you and helping more with how to promote eCommerce products.
What are the benefits?
Uniqodo’s broad capabilities make it a valuable solution for any eCommerce business. We are trusted by a number of global brands, including EE, Beauty Bay, and Travelodge. With Uniqodo’s Promotion Experience Platform in place, you can:
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Increase sales: By using Uniqodo's Promotion Engine, eCommerce brands can easily create and manage a wide range of promotions to increase customer engagement and conversion rates.
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Improve customer loyalty: Uniqodo can be used to reward loyal customers with special offers, discounts, and incentives. This can help to improve customer retention and loyalty, and can turn existing customers into brand advocates.
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Increase conversion rates: Uniqodo's Onsite Experience solutions can help to reduce cart abandonment by delivering targeted promotional messages to customers at key moments during their shopping journey. This can help to improve eCommerce conversion rates and incentivise customers to complete their purchase.
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Streamline promotion management: Uniqodo's Promotion Engine offers a feature-rich platform that does not require developer involvement in promotion management. This can help to streamline the process of creating and launching promotions, allowing marketing teams to focus on other areas of the business.
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Reach customers and new audiences : By using Uniqodo's Coupon Codes and Promotion Distribution solutions, ecommerce brands can increase their marketing ROI by delivering targeted promotions to the right customers at the right time across multiple channels. This can help to improve engagement and conversion while reducing the costs associated with traditional marketing methods.
Uniqodo provides both practical website integration (Google Tag Manager, APIs, HTML widgets, and JavaScript) and integration with third-party marketing tools. Recently, for example, Uniqodo partnered with the marketing platform DotDigital.
Once Uniqodo has been implemented and your promotions are up and running, you can easily review the success of campaigns through A/B tests and via Uniqodo’s transaction tracking for affiliate marketing promotions.
Pricing model: Variable, depending on use
Single-use unique codes: YES
Promotion types: ALL
Integrations: Any CRM or eCommerce platform
Best use case: Any business that retails online and wants to leverage promotions and user experiences to drive eCommerce conversion, acquisitions and revenue. Even if you don’t use promotional codes in your checkout, we have solutions to help you use unique codes and activation strategies to drive business results. With inbuilt fraud prevention and alerts, Uniqodo ensures promotions are controlled, secure, and optimised towards customer needs.
Pro tip: Want to know more about the power of a Promotion Experience Platform? Read our blog, ‘What on Earth is Promotion Experience, and How Could It Impact Your eCommerce Sales Strategy?’.
2. Talon.One
Emerging in the marketplace in 2015, Talon.One, has grown to work with brands such as Ticketmaster and Mercedes Benz. The platform offers customers the ability to create campaigns based on their own data. The process begins with a simple integration of Talon.One’s flexible API configuration. From there, customers can promote their coupons, discounts, referral discounts and loyalty programs.
Talon.One has features such as code control, setting validation criteria and reporting capabilities. It includes the ability to integrate with third-party APIs, and the platform is able to handle unexpected load spikes or peaks. Talon.One automatically scales to meet the demands of its customer’s needs. In addition, automation and customisable attributes are available with all plan types.
Pricing model: Variable, depending on use
Single-use unique codes: YES
Promotion types: ALL
Integrations: Most CRMs and eCommerce platforms
Best use case: B2B and B2C businesses
3. Voucherify
Positioned as a developer-friendly promotion engine, Voucherify entered the market in 2016. Some of the platform's largest customers include Bloomberg, Saatchi Art, and Bellroy. The API-first platform allows developers to integrate plugins and popular applications to build targeted campaigns.
A few notable features of the platform include setting advanced validation criteria, custom workflows with role-based access, flexible webhooks, and multi-use coupons. The platform claims to be enterprise-level ready with fast integration times.
Pricing model: Variable, depending on needs
Single-use unique codes: YES
Promotion types: ALL
Integrations: Most CRMs, eCommerce platforms, and mobile
Best use case: Large businesses and enterprises
4. EagleEye
Eagle Eye is positioned as a digital marketing platform that has been on the market since 2003. Primarily working with hospitality and food clients, the platform offers the ability to connect with new customers, develop digital services, reward customer loyalty, and reward staff loyalty. The platform covers 80% of the food and beverage market.
With its years of development, the platform offers features such as digital promotions, code control, customer targeting at checkout, prepaid gift cards, and an extended audience network. Eagle Eye is a powerful product for those who are looking to drive online to offline purchase and redemption as their platform can fully integrate into many POS systems.
Pricing model: Variable, depending on use
Single-use unique codes: YES
Promotion types: ALL
Integrations: Most POSs, CRMs and eCommerce platforms
Best use case: Food and beverage, retail, and grocery businesses
Suggested reading: Read our blog, ‘5 advanced digital marketing strategies for 2023’, to learn more about using promotions as part of a wider marketing strategy.
5. Vouchery
Vouchery is an AI-powered coupon management and automation platform, designed to help incentivise shoppers from across the different stages of the customer journey.
With Vouchery, eCommerce sites can create, redeem and synchronise their promotions in a single location, making it highly user-friendly and simplifying the promotion implementation process.
They offer additional features such as fraud detection and prevention, 24-hour customer support, and programmable APIs. Site data is stored on the cloud in Amazon Web Services (AWS), providing users with an extra layer of security against fraud.
Pricing model: Variable, depending on business size
Single-use unique codes: YES
Promotion types: Coupons
Integrations: Most CRMs and eCommerce platforms
Best use case: eCommerce brands and businesses working across multiple channels
Should Uniqodo be on this list at all?
As we mentioned, Uniqodo goes beyond standard promotion engines. Our platform is outcome-oriented and is designed to improve eCommerce customer acquisition, conversion, engagement and retention by optimising multiple segments of the customer journey. As a SaaS+ provider, we also offer comprehensive consulting services that allow clients to extract maximum value from their platform.
Our solution is not just a promotion engine: it is a promotion engine and experience. It takes into account the power of consumer psychology and CRO strategy to encourage clicks and, ultimately, drive revenue.
Why are promotion experiences important?
Fundamentally, you want a promotions engine because the native promotional marketing capabilities within your CRM or eCommerce platform are insufficient. As you continue to add capabilities, your expectations will continue to grow. The last thing you want is for your software procurement project to spiral into an in-house development project to improve the tool you bought. That’s why you didn’t build the tool in the first place.
Making sure that our customers can continue to customise and grow their online promotion strategy is exactly why we’ve expanded our platform capabilities to match. We want you to deploy the right strategy — driving important business outcomes — unconstrained by internal resources.
What driving business outcomes looks like
The flexibility of the bespoke promotional capabilities delivered by Uniqodo allow you to create sophisticated campaigns aligned with your needs. A few examples are:
Engaging promotions for underselling TUI holidays
Uniqodo’s software uses trading data to dynamically serve and adjust promotions in order to move distressed stock and protect revenues on higher-value products.
Uniqodo was employed by TUI to help improve profit on underselling holiday packages. Promotions were triggered based on specific search results based on underselling locations or dates, providing TUI with a 10,282% ROI and dramatic improvements in sales.
Improving Travelodge customer engagement with single-use codes
You can engage and attract new audiences with compelling offers that cannot leak or be shared on unintended third-party sites.
Travelodge was able to improve its performance in the competitive hospitality market by implementing a promo code campaign that shared single-use codes with individual customers. This ensured that profit margins and revenue were not compromised by the codes being leaked on other platforms.
Rewarding Beauty Bay customers with personalised promotions
Build a personalised marketing strategy to serve relevant and timely offers to customers based on product selection, search criteria or basket volumes.
Beauty Bay implemented Uniqodo’s software to share a limited period of discount offers to students, staff, and loyal customers. In order to access the codes, students were required to be registered with the site and then received a personal, controlled promotion code.
Uniqodo is perfectly positioned to help you find value at every stage of your promotional campaign, which makes it an exceptional choice that is broadly different from any other solutions available on the market.
A solution to meet your needs
Your promotional marketing strategy will only be as successful as the tools you utilise. It’s important to consider your unique needs and understand which platform provides the comprehensive features that serve your specifications.
Not only should the tech you invest in today meet your current needs, it should also ensure the longevity of your future promotions campaigns. This means taking into account each customer’s journey to promote loyalty and retention in the long term.
To learn more about Uniqodo and how it could help to launch your next successful promotional campaign, book a discovery call with us today.
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