Why Should You Switch to Voucherify? A Success Story from TIER

For most companies, changing any software platform is a difficult decision to make. Migration can get expensive, time-consuming, and risky. For these reasons, many enterprises delay platform migration for as long as possible. 

Modern businesses depend on third-party technology to perform virtually any business operation – from managing inventory to communicating with customers. Promotion Engines are a relatively new software category that taps into the idea of promotions-as-a-service, a slowly blossoming trend among decision-makers in all business verticals. After all, you don’t code your CRM platform, email system, or support service from scratch. So why should you deploy plenty of IT resources to code an in-house promotion tool?

If you already use an external Promotion Engine and notice that it has stopped delivering value or you are constantly surprised with your monthly invoice, it’s time to move on. In this article, you will find:

• 4 reasons why you should change your Promotion Engine.
• Main differences between Talon.One and Voucherify. 
• Migration case study from TIER mobility app.

4 reasons why you should change your Promotion Engine

In the business world, the only constant thing is change. New touchpoints, regulatory changes, never-ending competition, and changing customer trends are only a few business aspects that you must constantly adapt to. Digital promotions are no different. But when enough is enough? Here are my top 4 indicators that it’s high time to change your promotions provider:

1. It can’t keep up

If your business is rapidly growing (congratulations), the sheer number of customers, orders, and necessary incentives can reach a critical mass where you either scale back or update the back-office infrastructure to keep up with the demand. If you notice that your Promotion Engine is lagging behind with unsatisfactory response times, plenty of errors, or unexpected price spikes, it’s time to move on. 

2. It’s too expensive

Despite its critical importance in building positive customer relationships, a Promotion Engine is still an add-on. It doesn’t make sense to pay for a promotion platform the same or similar hefty price that you pay for your core ecommerce infrastructure. So if you notice that your invoice is getting higher, it's time to consider an alternative provider.

3. It doesn’t evolve

Your organization is constantly growing – and so should your promotion system provider. If the product releases are becoming less frequent and smaller, you might want to start paying closer attention to your provider’s roadmap (if it is accessible). You can try reaching out directly to them, but it is unlikely that any critical feature will be introduced on your specific request. Keep in mind that new customer touchpoints and deep personalization are challenging business goals to achieve on their own, especially with a bloated legacy promotion system holding you back.

4. It’s too complex

When selecting a Promotion Engine, you need to consider the bus factor among your team members. For example, if a person responsible for managing promotions leaves your company or changes responsibilities, how quickly you can train another person to ensure a continuous stream of promo offers to your audience? If your platform of choice is difficult to operate and learning resources are limited, you might be better off with a different provider. 

What are the main differences between Talon.One and Voucherify Promotion Engines?

Talon.One and Voucherify Promotion Engines are both great products and similar in guiding principles and features. Both platforms follow a headless, API-first model to power personalized incentives through plenty of marketing campaigns: promo codes, cart-level discounts, referrals, product bundles, gift cards, giveaways, and loyalty programs.  

However, when talking with Talon.One’s clients, I repeatedly heard the same arguments about why they were considering a platform switch. Here are some of them:

1. Pricing difference

Talon.One does not share its pricing information anywhere online, so it might be difficult to estimate whether you are paying a fair price.

Following the API-first industry standard, Voucherify pricing is based on the number of needed API calls, so how many times you will send or receive information from our API. Generally, each user session when a promo code is used may take up to 4 API calls – to generate, assign, validate and finally, redeem the promo code. This approach allows you to estimate the needed usage on the monthly basis and flexibly upgrade or downgrade the plan based on your needs. What's also great is that our Customer Success team will help you calculate your usage based on variables, such as numer of monthly orders, customers, and monthly sessions.

All features are available, even in the freemium plan. We want to make our pricing policies clear and transparent. You can find a detailed plan comparison here. Only the Enterprise plan is a custom quote but is still dependent primarily on your usage and extra add-ons, such as dedicated cluster or premium support. To good to be true? Try us in a 30-day free trial, no strings attached.

2. Overwhelming UI

Talon.One offers a single Campaign Manager for all promotion types. The differentiation between them takes place by setting up conditions and effects in the Rule Builder. According to client's reviews available online, this approach shows all the possible options upfront, but it also forces non-technical team members to look for the right condition/effect among plenty of options causing human errors. 

In Voucherify, the promotion logic works in a similar way, but we have decided to create individual builders for each campaign type to ensure a shallow learning curve for your team. In Voucherify, validation rules define the conditions for the application of the promotion. We preselect and group conditions and effects logical for the given scenario. 

3. Lack of distribution capabilities

Talon.One does not offer a built-in Distribution Engine. All incentives have to be distributed either by export, webhooks, or 3rd party apps. Therefore it is significantly harder to model incentive distribution right in the platform without help from external tools. 

Voucherify is the only Promotion Engine equipped with an internal distribution mechanism and a message editor, allowing you to design and send messages with codes and rewards straight from the dashboard. As per channels, you can use email, SMS, webhooks, or plenty of integrations. The distribution can take place based on numerous triggers, such as customers paying for orders, entering segments, redeeming codes, or any other custom event. For instance, you can set up a complete promo code flow for a birthday campaign – from campaign generation to users receiving codes in their inbox without leaving the dashboard. 

How to migrate from Talon.One to Voucherify?  

You might be thinking that it’s too late to switch providers now without breaking the user experience. I am lucky to report that you would be wrong then. Our technical team is already experienced in similar migrations and is ready to help you migrate without hitting the brakes on your promo campaigns. More on that in a case study below. 

Here is what you can expect from our migration services:

• Consultations with our team.  
• Guaranteed data security (we are ISO certified). 
• Cohesive promotional experiences with no migration downtime. 
• Flexible data storage mechanisms (metadata) that allow for a complete implementation of any business-specific objects and corner cases.

How does Talon.One to Voucherify migration work?

If you have done the math and arrived at a conclusion that Talon.One doesn’t deliver on what it promised, we are here to support you. Our migration team will help you translate Talon.One’s properties into the language that Voucherify API will understand. Luckily, Talon.One is an API-first promotion tool which means that the migration is quite easy to perform.  

Here is how this process works:

• Contact our team to define the migration scope and your expectations.
• Define the data that you want to export from Talon.One into Voucherify.
• Voucherify team analyzes the data and proposes a migration procedure. Depending on the complexity of your campaigns, the migration process can vary. 
• Perform a test import to verify if the results are correct. The Sandbox project can be used for a test migration.
• Perform the final migration. 

All of the above steps can be tailored to your unique needs and are performed in close collaboration between Voucherify and your team. The migration service is free of charge. 

Here is what you should do before making the switch:

• List down all promo campaigns that you are currently running.
• Categorize the campaigns and check which ones can be fully, partially, or not recreated.
• Run an analysis of the technical effort and risk associated with migration.
• Make the final decision to migrate or remain with the old provider.

How TIER made a switch and now saves 50% on subscription cost?

Some time ago, the Voucherify team was approached by one of the most popular mobility brands, TIER, that was looking for a quick way to migrate from Talon.One to Voucherify. Because of the piling subscription costs, TIER team intended to import vouchers into Voucherify to continue campaigns without breaking the experience for their growing user base. 

After analyzing their needs, the Voucherify team suggested the most efficient way to translate attributes into Voucherify. It turned out that voucher restrictions and attributes don’t need to be based on the validation rules mechanism. Instead, thanks to our flexible metadata mechanism, TIER team could quickly migrate any business-specific attributes to continue running all of their promo campaigns, without any issues for the end customers. 

Thanks to their strategic decision to change the promotion service, their team can continue to run creative behavior-based promo campaigns at a fraction of the original cost they got with Talon.One. By preparing a well-structured data import file, the Voucherify team could easily perform the migration. Whenever there was an error in the file, TIER and Voucherify teams were quickly able to mitigate any risks and continue the migration process without costly breaks or errors. All thanks to open and direct communication between both teams made possible by a joint Slack channel. The migration was completed in two weeks and now TIER saves over 50% on subscription costs monthly. 

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