Promotion Automation: How to Automatically Live Up to Your Customers' Expectations

One of the biggest challenges faced by every company is how to acquire new customers and nurture the existing customer base. A powerful tool allowing for achieving both of these objectives is a promotion automation strategy.

This post will explore the topic of promotion automation – provide its definition, examples, as well as benefits associated with automating your promotions. You will also learn how to create an automated promotion campaign with Voucherify. 

What is promotion automation?

Promotion automation can be defined as a process during which marketing tasks related to sales promotions are automated to increase customer engagement and perform sales functions more effectively. 

Thanks to automating your promotions, the sales cycle is reduced through planning communication and providing your customers with automated and contextual incentives. Promotion automation allows you to fully control the marketing campaign lifecycle – from initially creating a campaign to the moment your discount coupons are sent out and used. Importantly, when using promotion automation, you can be assured that your customers are getting the right incentives at the right time and in the right context – just when they need them. 

As an event performed by a customer is captured, for example, cart is abandoned or an order is cancelled, while using promotion automation, you are able to schedule an automatic best response. An effective usage of customer event tracking evinces itself in, for instance, sending out automatic emails with a discount coupon for an unfinished order which incentivize customers to eventually make a purchase, or happy birthday messages which boost customer loyalty. 

What are the benefits of promotion automation?

Automating sales promotions can bring plenty of benefits, including:

• Increased efficiency and productivity – automation saves time and resources by reducing the need for manual tasks such as data entry, scheduling, and follow-ups.
• Improved targeting and personalization – promotion automation systems, such as Voucherify, uses data to personalize promotions and campaigns for specific segments of customers, resulting in more effective promotion marketing.
• Better customer engagement – automation helps companies engage with customers in a more personalized, timely and relevant way, leading to increased satisfaction and loyalty.

Examples of promotion automation

1. Welcome campaigns

Imagine coming in on your first day of work and having no one to welcome you. Disappointing, right? The potential customers entering your website can feel the same way.

So! Make a good first impression – notice each new visitor on your landing page and incentivize your customers at hello. Show a messenger window or a small popup with a discount code for first order. The message is clear, carries real value for your potential buyer, and starts building outstanding experience with your brand right away. Go a step further – when a potential customer signs up onto your page, send them a welcome email! 

Top-performing US retailers send more welcome emails than their competitors who earn less, and are more willing to offer a discount right away in the first message. Considering retail clients, as many as one in four (24.9%) of those who receive welcome emails actually makes a purchase after opening one of them. 

2. Automated email campaigns with incentives

Remember – welcoming does not have to end there! Turn your welcome campaign into a series of automated targeted emails sent to potential customers (who, for example, voluntarily give you their precious emails while signing up to your mailing list) in order to educate them about your brand and provide information on your products or services. This way you build relationships with your potential buyers and nurture leads who may turn into customers! Even better if your messages carry a tangible value such as promo codes or notifications about on-sale products. 

3. Cart abandonment campaign

Your customers may add various items to their carts but then eventually decide that they give up on shopping. Yet, it still isn't a lost cause, or rather a lost customer! Creating a cart abandonment campaign will allow you to automatically send out emails to shoppers who abandoned their cart. Customers exiting the page will constitute the trigger for an email to come through to them which can include, for example, an encouraging message to come back to cart. There can also be a discount code sent out via this type of email which will incentivize the customer to come back and proceed to checkout.

Learn more: Examples of 6 cart abandonment campaigns

4. Behaviour-based campaign

Everybody likes being rewarded and you want your customers to feel appreciated. In order to upkeep a desirable level of customer loyalty, create a behavioural targeting campaign. For example, whenever a customer decides to create an account on your website, reward them with a discount coupon for their next order and notify them about this via an automatically sent email.

5. Birthday and anniversary campaigns

Celebrating exceptional moments in life is precious. What if your brand could wish you customers all the best on their special occasions? Through promotion automation, you are able to create an email campaign which will allow for sending special discounts, coupons, and vouchers to your loyal customers on their birthday or any type of anniversaries, for example, 1 year of being a signed up customer.

Learn more: Create your own birthday campaign at Voucherify

6. Customer support coupons

There is always a possibility that something will go wrong – your website can crash or an incident report can be sent out by one of your shoppers. Because of such things your customers may feel disoriented or possibly dissatisfied. However, apologising is always a good way to fix a problem. Create a customer support campaign which will allow you to send apologetic emails to those customers who reported problems or directly experienced difficulties associated with, for example, using your domain. Adding a discount coupon will go great with your message and certainly improve your customers morale about your company.

7. Weather-based campaign

Promotion automation allows you to create, for example, original coupon campaigns which suit your needs. You are running a business which sells winter attire? If you want to incentivize your shoppers, create a weather-based campaign! It will allow you to send discount coupons to your customers via email and the trigger for this activity will be: snowing at their location. Instead of discount coupons, you can create a BOGO promotion or offer free shipping. All of this just because it snows! Importantly, this campaign can go with anything - why not give your customers a discount for pizza when it rains?

Learn more: Build a no-code weather discount campaign

How to automate promotions with Voucherify?

Voucherify allows for creating promotion automation campaigns based on custom events – actions performed by customers. Promotions can be automated in 3 simple steps:

1. Share the custom event with Voucherify API

With custom events, you are able to use internal customer actions in Voucherify campaigns. Whenever you log a particular event, for example, on your website, you should call the Voucherify API and then the event will be noted in your Voucherify account. Consequently, this allows you for setting up campaigns where customers are incentivised based on the actions that they perform and the frequency of performing these actions. Logged events can be used to segment your audience and trigger distribution. 

Learn more: How do custom events work?

2. Use the events to segment customers and create rules

With the custom event in Voucherify, you can group customers around the recency and frequency of a particular action.  For examples, you can build a customer segment for all shoppers who abandoned their cart once or twice. 

Customer segmentation allows you to build fully automated campaigns that target only specific users. 

3. Trigger distribution (optional)

Voucherfiy covers the entire campaign lifecycle – from generation, through distribution, to redemption. You can use the built-in distribution mechanism to send relevant incentives to customers once the send-out is triggered. 

Summary

With the omnipresent need for a personalised approach, promotion automation can save the day. It is impossible to send manual messages every time holidays are coming or your customer celebrates their birthday. Instead, you can set up automatic campaigns which enable sending messages to your customers every time an important date arrives.

Needless to say, marketing automation provides not only scalability for growing business but also freedom for the marketing departments. Without much technical effort, your team can schedule advanced automatic actions and keep following their performance. Ultimately, the point of implementing advanced technology is to make leads and sales management easier and more effective.

With Voucherify, you can automate promo campaigns on the fly. Effective data synchronization can be achieved through our integrations with mParticle and Segment CDPs. 

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