How to Create Coupons and Discounts for Specific Products?

Rebates, discounts and promotional coupons are one of the most potent tools to intensify sales in an online store. All e-commerce sellers, sooner or later, need to introduce a promotional offer to attract more potential customers. 

The key to success is coming up with a coupon strategy beforehand instead of running a myriad of hit-or-miss promotional offers. One of the most popular coupon strategy is to offer coupon codes for specific products only. By creating coupon-specific products, you can quickly boost your up-selling and cross-selling potential by discounting less desirable products. 

The most common product-specific deals

There are multiple ways to implement product-specific coupons in your online store. Here are some of them:

Discount only selected products in your store

As much as 70% of customers expect and appreciate the individual treatment that comes with well-crafted personalized e-commerce experiences. By discounting selected products, and not whole orders, you not only get to work out a much better ROI, but also personalize your offers a bit more. For instance, you can discount different products based on customer preferences or send coupon codes on products from the customer’s wish-list.

Add a free product to predefined orders (BOGO campaign)

Offering extra products is a fantastic tactic for product debuts or an item relaunch. This type of product-specific discount also works great for seasonal products such as barbecue appliances in the summer. By attaching a free gift to a purchase, you give additional value to customers. By placing a proper strategy in place, this tactic can also help you increase the average order size, boost conversions and get rid of slow-moving stock.

Exclude high-value products from the discount

Running promotional offers should always, in the long run, work out a bigger profit for your brand rather than plunge you into a financial struggle. That’s why I discourage you from discounting the most exclusive items in your store. Discounting can have a negative impact on the sales of products that are considered high-value and luxurious. Coupon codes on this kind of items seem counter-intuitive for most consumers who may suspect bad product quality or other product defects which can effectively deter them from making the purchase. 

Discount the cheapest or the most expensive products in the cart

You can base product-specific coupon codes not only on the product itself, but also on the product price. This type of setup gives your customers more choice and freedom in selecting products in their carts. 

Discount products based on custom attributes such as color, category, expiration date

Who said that discount codes can’t be a bit of fun? You can launch special promotions for all green items in your store to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day or offer a 50% discount for all products with pumpkin-themed patterns for Halloween. Don’t be afraid of mixing things up a little and introducing custom product attributes that can work as a discount criterion. 

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Creating product-specific coupon codes in Voucherify

Voucherify is an all-in-one promotion engine that supports marketing teams worldwide in building and managing coupon and cart discounts, gift card, loyalty, referral, and giveaway programs. 

To see how Voucherify handles products and product-based promo codes, let’s use the example of a product family. 

Let’s assume you sell MacBook Air that comes in two versions (11 and 13 inches). To recreate this product-specific coupon workflow, you should have two different Stock Keeping Units (SKU), and the structure looks as follows:

• Product: MacBookAir
• First SKU: MacBookAir11
• Second SKU: MacBookAir13

So now, let’s see how to model it in practice.

Mapping products and variants

The first step is to create the products in Voucherify. You can do this either through the user interface or programmatically via API. 

Go to the Products tab and run the manager. After typing in the product name in the first section, you need to introduce attributes that differentiate product variants. In our case, there’s only one – the diagonal of the screen.

Building product variants

In the next steps, you need to add the concrete variants (called SKUs in Voucherify). To do so, add two new sub-items. 

Alright, so your products have been created! They all have unique identifiers that can be used in the API calls. Now, let’s model a coupon campaign that uses product and SKUs as the validation (redemption) rule.

Creating a product-specific coupon campaigns

Let’s assume that we want to give a 10% coupon discount only for 13-inch MacBooks, how can we achieve this with Voucherify? It’s quite straightforward really – we need to use validation rules to make the campaign active only for the variant we’re interested in. It is easy to achieve with the visual rules engine. 

Voucherify enables you to set two basic product-related rules:

• Which products/SKUs have to be in a customer’s cart to make a valid redemption?
• Which of these products/SKUs will be discounted during a redemption?
  

Moreover, with other validation rules, you can add more limits to your products-specific campaign:

• How many items can be in one order? Which segment of customers can use the discount?
• How many redemptions can be made using one coupon (per customer, per day, per campaign)?
• What is the required order value to make a valid redemption?
• And much more.
  

The rules engine is very flexible and allows you to create your unique buying scenarios. 

Now, let’s get back to our product-specific MacBook campaign.

After you submit the creator, every time a shopper tries to use the coupon from this campaign, Voucherify checks if there's a 13-inch MacBook Air item in the cart. If so, the redemption is marked as successful. Otherwise, it fails, and you can see it in the redemptions report. 

Again, this is all done with Voucherify under the hood. There’s really very little involvement required from the development team – only once to sync your inventory with Voucherify products.

What about cart promotions?

So far, I’ve been focused on coupon campaign, but if you’d like to encourage more orders and speed up the checkout process, you can run cart promotions (auto-applied discounts) too. Cart promotions are a type of discount that doesn’t require customers to manually type in the discount codes, instead if the customer profile or order matches the promotion criteria, the discount is applied automatically to the order. 

With Voucherify, you can use the same product-specific limitations for both unique discount codes and cart promotions. What’s even better is that with cart promotions, you can build separate tiers. For instance, if customer has two pairs of socks, add 5$ discount; if the same customer has more than three pairs make the discount 15$. Tiered product promotions are a great way to encourage more and bigger orders on slow-moving items. 

Conclusions

By introducing segments and products, we have shown you how many marketing personalization opportunities come with the rules engine. You know now that coupon customization goes on many levels and it’s up to you what limits a coupon will carry. You can freely mix different criteria, combining segments, products, SKUs, and cart volume to tailor promotional campaign to your unique business goals and increase your chances for more purchases.  
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