Voucherify and Segment: How to Effectively Use Customer Attributes for Personalized Promotions

If you happen to be a PM of a mid-to-big digital brand, you might expect a quest from management anytime soon: “Let’s use customer attributes we’ve been collecting for a while to make our promo offers a tad less dull.”

And if you’re equipped with a CDP like Segment, I might have some good news: you can now build a promotional MVP in a sprint. This is because we’ve recently released a new connector that helps you push data from a promotion engine to a CDP and the other way around.

Why do I need inbound and outbound traffic, you ask. Let’s review one of the typical scenarios we’ve seen implemented at companies that figured out how to run personalized promotions as part of their retention strategy.

Personalized promotions with Segment x Voucherify – how does it work?

To highlight the need for connection between a promotion engine and CDP, imagine the following scenario:

1. A new customer signs up for your shop.
2. They make their first purchase.
3. You entice them to leave a product review to make your brand more memorable and to uphold your customer acquisition tactics.
4. The incentive to write a review is a gift card.
5. Once the customer completes the review, you send them a unique gift card code via push notification. The code also lands in the customer's wallet next to other rewards/promotions they’re eligible for.
6. The customer decides to redeem the card with their next purchase
7. At the checkout, the gift card is validated against the rules and the gift card balance.
8. The redemption process is successful. The customer profile stores information about the review left and the redemption.
9. The business intelligence tool takes note of the redemption and calculates how rewards drive new reviews and, thus, retention and acquisition rates.

You can see there are several API calls in both directions (Segment and Voucherify). Still, on top of that, you need to transport events between the applications serving customer touchpoints and CDP and promotion engine too. Take a look at our war zone map:

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Let’s transform this map into a working configuration and POC code, shall we?

How to set up your own personalized campaign with Voucherify and Segment?

Note: the following demo shows a minimal configuration of connecting your order management system, CDP, and Voucherify. For the production-ready setup with proper identity resolution and data schema, consider integrating Voucherify source and destination with Protocols and Profile modules.

1. Create a source that mimics a modern ecommerce platform

Our mock ecommerce platform will consume customer actions such as “identify” and “track” and redirect them to Voucherify destination. To start, create a Server source in Segment and run the code snippets to test the connection. We’re going to use the Node.js SDK.

This is how those actions will be displayed on Segment’s dashboard:

2. Connect Voucherify as Segment Destination

For Segment to send information to Voucherify, we need to connect Voucherify as Segment’s destination. Use Application Keys to authenticate the connector.

After Voucherify and Segment are connected, events will be displayed on Voucherify’s dashboard. They can be found in the customer’s (in our case, Michael Scott’s) activity tab.

You can see that Voucherify qualified Mr. Scott for the  “Reviewers” segment. The “Reviewers” segment works on top of the “review_left” event in real-time – the moment Voucherify receives an event for a given Customer, it automatically recalculates the segment’s audience. 

“Review_left” is a custom event. Similarly to Segment, Voucherify allows you to control the data schema coming to the platform. The Event Schema view shows you the last registered event visible in the definition list.

3. Create a bulk of gift card codes as rewards

We’re going to create a bulk gift cards campaign that the customer can join only once to claim a $25 gift card. Below you can see the essential step of the campaign creation process – we need to create a custom validation rule: the customer can only join our campaign after writing a product review. Select the “Reviewers” segment in the Customer activity option to make it happen.

When a campaign is set up, a list of gift vouchers eligible for publication will be generated by Voucherify. 

4. Assign gift cards to customers

Once the gift cards with proper redemption limits are generated, it is high time to assign and send them to customers. To do that, we must create a distribution.

We used the Distribution functionality so that a particular gift card will be assigned to a given customer who meets our requirements, protecting our campaign from fraud. 

When the distribution is active, every customer who leaves a review and thus is enrolled in the Reviewers segment gets a unique gift card from our campaign.

5. Deliver the code to Mr. Scott. 

Behind the scenes, whenever a code is assigned to a customer, Voucherify triggers a Publication event. The event stores information about the code and the customer but can also carry additional metadata. The Segment connector detects publication events and sends them to the Segment source. Let’s see how it works. 

Create a Voucherify source in Segment by clicking “Add source” and then choosing Voucherify from the catalog. 

In the “Configuration” tab, you will see a key that needs to be copied. 

Access the Voucherify’s Integrations tab, choose Segment and configure the plugin to enable Voucherify → Segment traffic. Open settings and paste in the key copied from the Segment’s “Configuration” tab. 

Now, Voucherify knows where to send its information – Segment can display all the events from Voucherify, and publication is one of them.

After successfully publishing the voucher code, the event is visible in Segment’s source debugger section. 

Consequently, you can now connect Voucherify source to a destination that delivers the gift card codes via email or push notification. 

With little code, we’ve built a real-time chain of events that rewards customers with a gift card code once they leave a review. There’s one more step where the connector adds value – the notification about the gift card redemption.

6. React to gift card redeemed event

Gift cards are now live. Your customers leave reviews and get rewards. 

Let’s handle the rewards redemption with Voucherify API. First, we will use the JavaScript SDK to simulate Mr. Scott redeeming his gift card.

Voucherify registers the activity of Mr. Scott redeeming his code.

As promised, Voucherify pushes the information about successful a redemption to Segment. This is achieved out of the box with Voucherify and Segment integration, which we used for the publication event a while back. 

7. Connect both sources to view a complete customer profile

Go to Segment’s tab Unify → Profile Explorer and access a complete customer profile with review_left, customer.publication.succeeded, and redemption.succeeded events displayed.

Why Voucherify and Segment integration is the best option for your business?

By implementing our new connector that helps you push data from a promotion engine to a CDP (and the other way around), your business can leverage its customer attributes to create targeted promotions. For example, the promotions can be based on customers' past purchases, browsing history, demographics, and actions, such as leaving a review.

Learn more: Discover more ideas for CDP-powered incentives and rewards

Segment's event tracking and user identification capabilities can be effectively used to automatically trigger Voucherify campaigns, personalize incentives, and measure the effectiveness of campaigns in real-time. Moreover, as demonstrated in our scenario, the Voucherify and Segment integration is insanely easy and can be carried out in simple steps, without any extra coding work. 

Such a powerful integration of the two platforms will help your business to take advantage of the inbound and outbound traffic to create targeted and effective marketing campaigns. As a result, your brand will be able to drive customer acquisition, retention and nurture customer loyalty by delivering just the right behavior- and preference-based incentives to the right customers at the right time.

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