Launching MoEngage Coupons: A Smart Way to Provision Coupons

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Sounds tempting right! Who doesn’t love a good coupon? Unless you have been living under a rock, you would have come across plenty of coupons for such deals while buying a new outfit, or booking your next trip, or signing up for a music app.

Here’s a fun fact! The first coupon is believed to be issued in 1888 by Coca-Cola – a ticket for a free glass of cola drink. They offered hand-written vouchers to the public entitling them to a free glass of Coca-Cola, then retailing at 5 cents. The goal was to get people to try the product — and it worked like a charm.

Brands over the years have discovered the power of coupons and have used them in numerous ways to encourage customers to take desired action. Whether it’s reducing the friction in purchases, rewarding the loyal customers, or reviving inactive users, coupons have been a go-to tool for marketers.

Brands and their marketing campaigns predominantly relied heavily on generic coupon codes that anyone could use, such as ‘BOGO’ or ‘FIRST10’. However, such campaigns fell short in delivering a personalized experience and were frequently prone to misuse and fraud. To counter these issues, brands began moving towards unique coupons.

Reason behind the shift? Unique coupons offer several advantages:

• Personalized coupons make customers feel special
• Unique code reduce the sick of promo abuse
• Tailor the offers to better match customer needs
• Enable more detailed tracking of usage
• Creates sense of urgency, encouraging immediate redemption

Given all these benefits, brands today prefer using unique, often single-use coupons to maximize returns and avoid misuse. However, with these coupons being unique, these coupons need to be effectively allocated to customers. Let’s look at how marketers manage coupon distribution today and the challenges they face.

Challenges Brands Face Today

For brands to extend unique, single-use coupons, they first need to pre-assign these to all the customers. This mechanism has its own set of challenges. Lets have a look at what the journey of a marketer today typically looks like:

• Create Coupons in the Promo Engine: Marketers utilize a coupon generation platform to create coupons that adhere to specific business rules and requirements

• Download Target Users from the CEP: Marketers download the users in the target segment from the Customer Engagement Platform (CEP)

• Pre-Provision Coupons Offline and Upload to CEP: Marketers assign created coupons to individual users offline, typically in a CSV, and upload this file to the CEP to update user profiles.

• Trigger Assigned Coupons for Users: Marketers set up campaigns for the target users, integrating the assigned coupons and triggering their distribution.

The pre-assigning of coupons results into various pain points

• Inefficient Budget Utilization: In the case of pre-assigning, coupons are provisioned and allocated to users in advance based on the available budget. However, not all users redeem these, and since these cannot be extended to other eligible customers, many go unused. This results in underutilization of budget, diminishing negatively affecting the profitability and ROI of the marketing efforts.

• Delays in Reaching Newly Eligible Users: New customers who become eligible after the initial coupon distribution often miss out on offers due to the delay in coupon assignment.

• Wasted Time and Effort in Coupon Assignment: The process of pre-assigning coupons, and then reassigning them later if they go unused, is time-consuming.

• Coupon Mismanagement: Storing pre-assigned coupons as user attributes can be tedious and prone to errors. This makes tracking redemption difficult, and if not updated properly, used coupons might be triggered again, leading to a poor user experience.
  

This clearly shows, pre-assigning of coupons is not the apt solution. What brands need is dynamic allocation of these coupons to eligible users, and that’s where MoEngage Coupons comes into action.

Introducing MoEngage Coupons: A Smart Way to Provision Coupons

MoEngage Coupons is a dynamic coupon provisioning solution designed to help brands effectively allocate and distribute single-use coupons, maximizing customer engagement while optimizing costs.

It enables brands to:

• Efficiently allocate unique, single use coupons 1-1 in real time

Brans can randomly allocate unique single-use coupons to eligible customers. With no pre-assignment required, coupons aren’t locked to users and can be flexibly assigned in real time. This approach reduces unnecessary coupon generation and unredeemed waste, reducing time spent on assigning and reassigning coupons. As a result, brands can enhance their budget planning and utilization, maximizing returns.

• Manage coupons from a single unified dashboard or using APIs

Brands can efficiently manage all their coupons from one place—ingest new coupon lists, edit existing ones, add new coupons, or delete and archive with a single click.
Additionally, brands can monitor the status, expiry, total and available coupons, and more for all the lists at one place, ensuring streamlined availability. Prefer using APIs? MoEngage offers that flexibility too.

• Proactive alerts for coupon shortages, expiries and ingestion status

Brands can get timely alerts over email for coupon shortages or upcoming expiries, ensuring no campaigns fail due to lack of available coupons. Brands can also receive alerts on the status of the coupon imports.

• Coupon Usage Report enabling effective auditing

Brands can download the Coupon Usage Report to track what coupons were allocated and sent to which customers. This helps brands with effective auditing of coupons usage later.

How brands can use Coupons across industries

Brands can use MoEngage Coupons as an effective tool to distribute coupons and incentivize customers across various scenarios. They can extend these to:

• Reward their loyal customers

• Acquire new customers

• Boost repeat purchases

• Recover the abandoned carts

• Promote seasonal or flash sales

• Revive the inactive customers

Brands can leverage coupons to give a diverse range of benefits, not limited to:

Offering Discounts

Brands can use coupons to incentivize purchases and boost spending:

• Percentage Off: Offer a discount on the total purchase price (e.g., 20% off).
• Dollar Amount Off: Provide a fixed discount on the overall purchase (e.g., $10 off).
• Free Shipping: Waive shipping fees on orders that exceed a specified value.

Unlocking premium Content  

Brands can delight customers with coupons to unlock exclusive content. They can grant access to special articles, webinars, or features.

Extending Free Upgrades 

Brands can extend free upgrades to premium customers

• Tier: Upgrade customers to a higher membership levels
• Service: Provide complimentary access to premium services for limited time
• Product: Offer free upgrades to the latest products

The Business Impact Brands Can Drive

MoEngage Coupons offers an effective provisioning and distribution mechanism that enables brands to drive key business metrics, including:

1. Boost Sales: Offering personalized deals increases the likelihood of purchases, driving sales and revenue.
2. Customer Acquisition and CAC: Targeted coupon strategies can attract new customers, potentially lowering customer acquisition costs.
3. Increased Average Order Value (AOV) and Customer Lifetime Value (CLV): Coupons can incentivize higher spending per transaction and promote repeat purchases, thus increasing both AOV and CLV.
4. Customer Loyalty and Retention: Personalized deals encourage repeat purchases, fostering long-term customer loyalty.
5. Enhanced Customer Experience: Unique random coupon codes make customers feel special and valued, enhancing engagement and loyalty.
6. Increased Promotional ROI: Unique coupon codes allow businesses to control distribution and usage, ensuring that the budget for discounts is maintained while maximizing effectiveness.

Final Thoughts

As the impact of using coupons on key business metrics illustrates, Coupons can be a powerful method of guiding customer behavior while deepening their relationship with your brand. MoEngage Coupons simplifies the allocation and distribution of coupons to eligible customers boosting engagement and returns, while minimizing managing these.

We look forward to seeing you embrace the power of incentivising your customers with MoEngage Coupons. If you wish to get started, feel free to set up a quick demo for the same here.