8 Telltale Signs You Need a Promotion Engine

In theory, you only need a sheet of paper (an Excel sheet if you are feeling tech-savvy) and a pen to kickstart a coupon campaign. All it takes is a catchy code pattern, writing it down, asking your IT team to accept it as a 10% discount, or instructing your staff to count it as one at the counter, and that’s it. Easy, right? Well, brace yourself for the reality check.

The new market reality for promotion marketing

The landscape of marketing has undergone a seismic shift due to rapid digitization and the growing demand for personalization. Succeeding in incentive marketing now requires marketers to navigate through scattered data sources and juggle multiple dependencies while closely monitoring the campaign budget and the looming threat of promotion fraud.

• 83% of consumers state that coupons were the reason for a difference in their shopping behavior, with 39% reporting that a coupon was the reason for buying a particular product sooner than anticipated (Inmar Intelligence).
• US businesses lose $300 million up to $600 million yearly due to coupon fraud. Worryingly enough, 81% of coupon abuse attempts are said to come from serial abusers (Ekata).
• Price is the #1-factor keeping customers loyal to their favorite brands.

Swift digitization has rendered success in commerce virtually impossible without a robust system that can generate dynamic and personalized promotions – a promotion engine if you will. But how can you determine if it's necessary for your business? Learn why and when to consider adding a promotion engine to your commerce stack.

What is a promotion engine?

Promotion engine is a type of marketing software that takes the hassle out of creating, managing, and executing promotional campaigns, such as discount coupons, cart promotions, referrals, gift cards, or even loyalty programs. 

With a promotion engine, you can quickly set rules and conditions for each promo, ensuring each incentive fits the bigger picture – no more generic promos that make your budget disappear into thin air.

Any good promotion engine will also equip you with the necessary tools to automate incentive distribution (whether through built-in messaging or 3rd party integrations). The same goes for analytics – with a promotion engine, you can dive deep into customer behavior, campaign performance, and overall promo strategies to see what works and what doesn’t. 

How to tell if you need a promotion engine?

How can you tell if a promotion engine is a missing piece in your marketing puzzle? Here are a few signs to watch out for:

1. You are losing (or already lost) control over too many campaigns

Promotion marketing can be more or less effective for specific industries. However, if you are operating in the FMCG, food delivery, or fashion industry, you are more likely to run more than one campaign at a time. 

Suppose you are drowning in a bottomless sea of promotions, struggling to manage and coordinate them all manually. In that case, it's a clear indicator that a promotion engine could be what you need. It can bring order to the chaos, automating the process and saving you valuable time and effort.

How iBood regained control over campaigns with Voucherify?

iBood is a prominent deal community platform in Europe boasting a massive customer base of over 2 million online shoppers. With such a scale, it was evident that iBood needed to bring order to the constant influx of deals.

Key challenges:

• Manual management of coupon campaigns for different segments and locations.
• The constant threat of fraud with lax budget and redemption limits. 
• Lack of automation – all campaigns had to go through the tech team, slowing down time to market tremendously.
• Need for manual clean-up of invalid or expired offers, leading to human errors and inconsistent customer experience. 

To effectively engage its millions of customers, iBood required a high level of promotion automation. Thankfully, they discovered Voucherify, allowing their marketing teams to launch campaigns and independently define all necessary promotion limits. 

2. You waste precious time building and launching campaigns manually

Time is money. This is especially true for digital marketing campaigns. Incentives and rewards do wonders for viral campaigns and real-time marketing efforts – if you find yourself missing the boat each time your marketing team comes up with a creative, last-minute campaign idea, you’ve got a real problem on your hands. 

Here is how a poor campaign generation process hinders your marketing efforts:

• All campaigns need to be set up and released by the development team, distracting them from other key business objectives. 
• Manual campaign generation leads to configuration errors and duplicates. 
• Inefficient systems limit your personalization capabilities and place rigid constraints on the number and types of campaigns you can run. 

3. You can’t automate and personalize promotion communications

The worldwide usage of promotional emails has made people demand more personalized and valuable content. Sending emails to the masses is no longer enough. Subscribers need well-targeted and personalized messages worth their attention. But it's not as easy as it may seem. Here are some common limitations that digital teams face regarding incentive distribution:

• It is impossible to link unique codes to individual customers.
• Codes are only generated in text form (no barcode or QR code) for cross-channel campaigns.
• No automatic coupon reminders or promotion notifications to guide customers' shopping journey.
• Limited or no 3rd party integrations with popular messaging platforms. 

How Pomelo spun a referral campaign with Braze & Voucherify?

Pomelo is a leading omnichannel fashion platform in Southeast Asia. As a technology-driven company, Pomelo knew it needed to craft a personalized marketing strategy powered by best-of-breed software solutions. To support its growing customer base, they need a flexible tool to kickstart and manage personalized discounts and referral campaigns. 

Key challenges:

• Engaging a growing customer base in 10+ countries.
• No possibility of launching multi-channel discounts and tiered referral programs.
• Issues with performance monitoring of coupons distributed through a partner network.

By leveraging Voucherify integration with Braze, Pomelo ensured a consistent incentive experience across various customer touchpoints, such as mobile and web apps. Consequently, the marketing team gained a valuable tool that empowered them to execute and monitor promotional campaigns within a short timeframe independently.

Pomelo capitalized on Voucherify's comprehensive distribution capabilities, enabling them to target customers with timely and personalized incentives through Braze. Using one-off coupons delivered via email, flash banners, and a network of partners, they created a highly efficient and well-coordinated omnichannel promotion experience.

4. You are losing money on promotions

Coupon abuse affects a majority of companies, and this shameful statistic is growing alongside the popularity of online promotions. But promotion fraud does not only stem from a lack of proper monitoring or lax restrictions; here are some things that may cause negative promotion ROI:

• You have no (or limited) control over who, when, and how redeems your offers. 
• You cannot quickly react to issues and deactivate incentives. 
• You cannot discount specific products and SKUs.
• Unauthorized team members can generate and use discounts for their personal use. 
• You cannot offer dynamic discounts (where the final discount value changes based on different parameters). 

How TIER Mobility limited fraud by 60% with Voucherify?

TIER Mobility is a leading provider of shared micro-mobility services worldwide, aiming to revolutionize urban transportation. To drive growth, TIER relies heavily on promotions and incentives to drive growth, particularly when entering new markets. The TIER team faced challenges with their previous system, such as manually entering codes into Excel sheets and encountering configuration errors. They lacked a user-friendly dashboard that allowed their 400+ users to run campaigns without worrying about errors and fraud. 

Thanks to the Voucherify team management tool and advanced targeting capabilities, TIER limits the instances of promo fraud by over 60%. By limiting manual promotion management to the minimum, the TIER team could effectively combat configuration errors that are a big chunk of the revenue every month, making promotions finally profitable. 

{{How TIER Mobility cut internal processes by 70% with Voucherify}}

Key challenges:

• No approval workflows and a limited number of users prolonged the campaign creation and troubleshooting processes.
• Manually creating promo codes was time-consuming and prone to errors.
• Rampant fraud was eating into TIER's marketing budget. 

Thanks to the Voucherify team management tools and advanced targeting capabilities, TIER limits the instances of promo fraud by over 60%. By limiting manual promotion management to the minimum, the TIER team could effectively combat configuration errors that are a big chunk of the revenue every month, making promotions finally profitable. 

5. Your sales promotions are unattractive and easy to skip

It’s nothing personal – but perhaps the reason your campaigns are falling flat is a lack of creativity and a proper UX layer. These may stem from the limited capabilities of your promotion software and lower priority for promotion marketing as a whole – which makes sense in specific industries and business contexts. 

Here are some reasons customers may put your offers in the spam folder:

• The promotion journey is interrupted by irrelevant offers. 
• Your campaigns are generic and lack personal touch. 
• The promotion UX is limited to the website banner. 
• Customers cannot combine and stack deals which may lead to disappointment. 

6. Your promotion system cannot cope with the growing scale

Any experienced project manager understands that "The Launch" is often the simplest step in any marketing endeavor. The real challenges come afterward – in the form of customer requests, team demands, and, most importantly, the strain on the whole promotion system. 

Here are some symptoms that signify that your promotion software is not up to the task of supporting your brand’s growth:

• Any huge sales events, such as Black Friday or Cyber Monday, cause your promotion stack to crash or lag. 
• Simple incentive validation and redemption take several seconds on average, negatively impacting CX and drastically increasing cart abandonment. 
• It is difficult (or impossible) to scale your promotion strategy to other currencies, languages, countries, time zones, or portfolio brands. 

How BEAMIN handles over 100 000 redemptions daily with Voucherify?

BAEMIN, a food delivery platform operated by Woowa Brothers Corp in South Korea, expanded into the Vietnamese market in 2019 and quickly became one of the largest players, with approximately 5 million customers. Given the intense competition in the food delivery industry, BAEMIN Vietnam sought to attract customers and establish a strong presence in the Vietnamese market. 

{{How BAEMIN handles millions of redemptions in a coupon-hungry market?}}

Key challenges:

• Saving development time on building a promotion tool from scratch. 
• Ensuring the platform scalability in peak moments of the day (typically around dinner time). 
• Making the code validation and redemption lightning-fast to prevent order cancellations. 

BAEMIN Vietnam has already launched over 1000 campaigns and handled over 60 million redemptions with Voucherify, with daily redemption rates averaging 100 000. By hosting their campaigns on a private cloud cluster, BEAMIN ensures that their customer data is safe and that 3rd parties won’t suddenly impact the platform performance. 

7. Your promotion analytics are limited to Excel

Was the promotion successful? This is the single most complicated question any marketer has to answer. As brands search for a reliable way to measure their campaigns' success, marketers seek tested frameworks and tools that help them track and attribute sales to specific marketing campaigns, including promo codes and discounts.

But calculating the ROI of your marketing campaigns is more challenging than it may seem. You'll need a plan for gathering information, tools to analyze that information, and a benchmark for success. Without these things, you won't get the desired results, which could hurt your bottom line.

If you nod to any of the following, you need better promotion software in terms of analytics:

• You cannot determine which promotion brought the best results regarding your specific OKRs.
• You don’t have an overview of campaign performance across countries, brands, or currencies. 
• You cannot track campaign performance in real-time, limiting your ability to jump in in case of problems. 
• You cannot combine the promotion-related activities of a given customer with other shopping behavior, hindering the creation of a 360-degree user profile. 

How Subito A/B tests promotions with Voucherify?

Subito is the leading platform in Italy for sustainable buying and selling, which attracts over 13 million unique users monthly. To support its ongoing expansion, Subito has joined forces with Voucherify, a partnership that allows them to implement dynamic and adaptable promotional campaigns tailored to its rapidly growing user community. With the help of Voucherify, Subito can effectively engage and retain its expanding user base while fueling its continued growth in the market.

Key challenges:

• A need for a flexible promotion solution that would cover plenty of use cases.
• Lack of time, resources, and experience to code a promotion solution from scratch.
• Need for detailed analytics and A/B testing capabilities.

Subito uses Voucherify for separate product lines. Thanks to analytics views, their growth team can see at a glance the overall performance and impact of a particular campaigns. The marketer-friendly dashboard allows their team to run small-scale experiments to A/B test different copy, discount values, and types to determine what makes their customers convert. To support their A/B testing strategy, they developed an internal solution for targeted banner display, displaying appropriate discount codes to specific customer groups.

8. You cannot combine different types of promotions

The last sign that you need a promotion engine is about launching new marketing campaigns as the market reality shifts. If you find yourself in a situation where each new campaign type forces you to purchase a new solution or code something from scratch yourself, then your time to market is significantly reduced, and your TCO will eventually skyrocket. 

Modern digital experiences demand combinability from brands to deliver the most optimal customer experience. In the context of incentives and rewards, you can connect your loyalty program with referrals and discount programs, for instance. 

How easyJet generated COVID-19 refunds in 6 weeks with Voucherify?

easyJet, a prominent player in the airline industry, holds the impressive position of being the seventh-largest airline worldwide. With a vast customer base of 48 million individuals spanning 35 countries and serving 154 airports, easyJet's influence is undeniably far-reaching.

{{How easyJet managed the Covid-19 crisis with automated refunds}}

However, their new venture, easyJet holidays, was launched in early 2019, only to be met with the unexpected challenges posed by the global COVID-19 pandemic. As the pandemic took hold, easyJet holidays faced the unfortunate necessity of canceling numerous holiday packages, significantly reducing their offerings.

In response to these unforeseen circumstances, the easyJet team had to adapt their marketing plans swiftly, shifting their focus to handle involuntary and voluntary cancellations.

Key challenges:

• The dire need to maintain liquidity during the pandemic. 
• Limited time to implement a solution to handle and automate refunds quickly.
• Promotion of their new line among existing and new customers. 

Right after the pandemic hit and customer service got flooded with refund requests, easyJet holidays started looking for a solution to process returns to gift credits at scale automatically. The complete integration took approximately six weeks, from the initial contact with Voucherify to the first refund processed with the Voucherify API.

Summary

With the rapid digitization and demand for personalization, businesses face various challenges in effectively managing and executing promotional campaigns. From wasting time on manual campaign generation, the inability to automate and personalize communications, losing money on promotions, to limited promotion analytics.

Leading brands, such as Pomelo, TIER, and easyJet already boosted their promotion experiences with the best-of-breed promotion engine. By leveraging a promotion engine, they streamlined their promotional campaigns, automated tedious processes, personalized incentives, combated fraud, and achieved positive campaign ROI.

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