What Is A Promotional Code And How To Offer It To Your Future Customers?

Posted by basshopper on May 26th, 2019

Promotional codes are a very important marketing tool for a brand, because it allows attracting new users or increasing the recurrence of purchase of those who are already customers through advantages or discounts. The promotional code is very associated with the concept of coupon, although they keep some differences. In this article we explain the characteristics of promotional codes and how you can offer them to your online community to increase short-term sales.

What is a promotional code?
Promotional codes are codes associated with a discount or an advantage, such as 'free shipping', 'free sample' or '2 × 1'. Your benefit is applied in the purchase process when the holder of that code presents it before making the payment. This code can have several forms: it can be an alphanumeric string, or a set formed only by letters or numbers, it can be a bar code or a QR code. The important thing is to be able to identify this code with a valid advantage within the promotional actions of the brand.

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In the online world, promotional codes began to be used as sales promotion in e-commerce. Many online store creation platforms, such as Magento have tools to generate promotional codes. But apart from generating them, which can be relatively easy, the interesting thing is to find an efficient way to distribute them in the online and offline channels of the brand or company, so that the offer is known and becomes more visits and more purchases. To do this, the coupon and code apps offer a good solution that we will show below. It is about seeing examples of how promotional codes are and how they are disseminated.

Coupon and code, how they complement each other
As an important point, point out the difference between coupon and code. Many times they are used as synonyms, more in the world of marketing. A coupon is usually a paper or a digital image that explains the advantage of the promotion. Most coupons are discount vouchers with a defined percentage or an established amount, but they themselves describe the same promotional advantage as a code. The coupon is usually the image that shows the benefit and does not have to be nominative, nor have an associated code.

If the promotion can already communicate well with the coupon, why use a code? There are several reasons to use codes accompanying the coupon, and of course, it is not always necessary. It will depend a lot on the nature of the campaign and the product. On the one hand, when the promotion distributes the same code to all customers, for example "SUMMER20", the main objective is to identify more specifically which promotion the customer comes from, in order to account for and analyze which actions have a higher ROI.

Another option is to distribute one-time codes, unique codes, to each beneficiary. In this type of action we want to identify this person more concretely, to keep track of how his conversion has been : in which channel we have impacted him, what code he has obtained and when he has exchanged it. The promotional code makes a lot of sense when the promotion we have in mind has a maximum number of beneficiaries (for example because the profit margin is reduced enough and we can not afford a large number of discounts); also for promotions where we want to analyse how is this conversion process, or in businesses where it is important to quickly identify and redeem the promotion, therefore, we need to present the coupon with alphanumeric codes, bar codes or QRs and be able to verify them easily.

Giving discount vouchers and other promotional coupons has its benefits, but also its risks. One of the difficulties is that if a promotion is launched without restrictions, and without segmentation, it can negatively affect the image of the brand and the product, and that users associate a lower cost. In short, doing indefinite promotions and without limiting the scope can make the brand and the product lose value. On the other hand, if you offer promotional codes through an app, within a limited campaign in time and in the target audience, it becomes an exclusive action, an advantage that can be exploited before losing it forever. This is because the promotional code is not delivered without anything in return, but the user leaves their data and proves to be interested in the product. This allows a first filter, which is complemented by others that we can generate: the channel through which we distribute the promotion, the segment to which we disseminate through promotion , the fields that we request in the registration form, etc.