"While our prices continue to represent a tremendous value every day, we now understand that customers are motivated by promotions and prefer to receive discounts through sales and coupons applied at the register"
… Daphne Avila, JC Penney Director, 27 March 2013.
With this statement, Avila best sums up a well known retail fact - that customers love a great deal. Using voucher codes (or coupons), customers are best placed to recognise value gained in transacting as they see the full cost of their purchase as well as the magnitude of discount.
Shopperee enables voucher transactions by providing checkout (or point-of-sale) voucher/promotional discount codes. These codes are typically used to drive short term sales; however, many businesses also use them to estimate ROI in different advertising channels and in combination with eDM - business use vouchers to drive repeat sales.
To read more about creating vouchers in Shopperee, see the Vouchers section.
Driving Short Term Sales
It's well known that promotions can help drive short term sales. Using discount voucher codes is one way to use the promotion lever. In Shopperee, this is simply achieved through creating a voucher code and distributing that code through advertising. Shopperee can easily accomodate any of the following:
- Sale of a specific item, service or schedule backstopped by an expiry date to enforce scarcity.
- Increase utilisation of under-booked schedules by spot reduction of prices to increase demand.
- Spot or short term sales using immediate communication channels such as Twitter or Facebook.
Estimating ROI In Different Advertising Channels
With several competing advertising channels, marketers have always sought the answer to the question - "How should I distribute my ad budget so I can optimise my sales?". One common way to find an answer is to create a manual A/B test. That is, create an exact offer using several different offer codes and run a mirrored campaign over your competing channels. Take for example a marketer who's been asked to determine which of Google Adwords, Local Newspaper Advertising or Radio Commercials is the best way to market a business. In this example, the marketer would:
- Create an identical offer, say a total checkout discount of 20%, creating 3 vouchers in Shopperee to enable differentiation.
- Setup 3 ad campaigns with the 3 different channels ensuring that the ads were run at the same time and promoted the voucher codes with the same expiry dates.
Each of the 3 different channels would use the differentiating voucher codes created in (1).
At the end of the promotional period, the marketer would then understand which voucher code achieved the most sales and, after factoring in campaign costs, can determine the most effective advertising channel.
Maximising Repeat Sales
Customer acquisition is a costly exercise for businesses. Many businesses spend their hard earned revenue through sales aggregators such as Group On or on costly above-the-line marketing like print or online ads. One way to reduce the cost of acquisition is to ensure that customers won through hard fought marketing re-engage with your business for little or no acquisition cost.
Shopperee supports repeat business by providing an understanding of customers and their engagement levels so you can offer more and foster a more rewarding relationship. The following should be considered by almost all businesses:
Customer Type | Tactical |
---|---|
Engaged | Consider selling higher level goods or services with a discount offer. For example, offer a top-of-the-range racquet at a discount which shows your business takes care of its top clients. |
Lapsed | Reactivate lapsed customers with a discount to reintroduce them to your business. Consider comms to explain that you know that they've lapsed and want to tell them about how you've changed to better serve them. |
New | Build a relationship by educating new customers on your offers and incentivise them to re-engage with a discount. |
Such tacticals will enable most businesses to maintain an ongoing relationship with their customer base, ensuring the initial acquisition expense is a solid investment.
Find out more about automated Engagement Segmentation.