Using Sailthru’s Promo Codes to Personalize Your Discounts

Every retailer uses discounts for a very simple reason: They work. But discounting is much more complicated than putting promo codes out into the universe and suddenly acquiring new customers, everywhere from Facebook to the subway. Discounts are more than just an incentive. If you use them right, they can also help build loyalty.

That’s exactly what we had in mind when we built our new Promo Codes functionality. It helps an already existing workflow, one that had been evolving because of the marketplace. And as a bonus, it’s also extremely user-friendly, allowing our customers to discount without difficulty.

The Devolution of One-Size Fits All Promo Codes

In the past, retailers used generic, one-size-fits-all coupon codes. A promo could have been based on anything; the retailer would create a single identifier and send it out into the wild. That code helps identify which discount campaign performs at which level, how many customers you acquired or re-engaged, and how much revenue the promo code drove.

However, like so many other things, the Internet has democratized the distribution of discounts. Coupon aggregators scour the Internet for generic promo codes. So when someone is shopping, they aren’t necessarily targeted with a specific offer. Instead, they can check availability on RetailMeNot or Honey, incentivizing everyone to hold out for a big discount. These promotions don’t help drive specific lift; they just hurt the bottom line.

They’re great for the customer. Less so for the retailer. To flip that, and make promo codes good for the brand and the buyer, we built the ability to integrate single use promo codes into your marketing campaigns.

Seamlessly Moving Toward Personal Promos

Rather than a generic code like SUMMER18, retailers can use single use coupon codes, with each one being unique to one consumer. Say you send all your loyalty members 20% off for fall clearance. They all have their own unique single code, associated with a specific email and built into the API that’s communicating the sell-through. Point-of-sale and content management systems track independently, but with Marigold Engage by Sailthru infinitely easier to tie it back to the promotional loyalty group.

All you have to do is create a list of one-time-use codes or generate a file using Shopify and then upload it to Sailthru as a promotion. That single snippet can display a unique code for each customer on your email list, whether it’s a large campaign or a post-purchase series with our Lifecycle Optimizer, where you can already track purchases against campaigns and messages.

This is possible even if you’re doing a campaign to hundreds and thousands of individuals. Because we generate each email individually, this works in our system, enabling you to separately associate each code with a different user. We handle this part, eliminating cumbersome manual work on the part of the marketer. The format also matches that of Shopify, which is similar to other commerce vendors, making the upload simple as well.

Promo Codes is designed to support the distribution of single use codes in sell-through emails. In the future, we’ll also extend that to be onsite and in mobile.

If you’re a Sailthru customer and interested in starting, please reach out to your Customer Support Manager. If you’re not working with us, but want to see Promo Codes in action, please get in touch.