This is an installment in a series of use cases that span the shopper journey across commerce, marketing, and service. It covers industry best practices, as well as how-tos around setting up these journeys with Salesforce.

Using coupon codes is a time-tested strategy that companies deploy to drive sales and raise awareness. As a shopper, you’ve undoubtedly used one before. As a retailer, coupon redemptions are most likely an integral part of your marketing and promotional strategy.

But coupon codes can also unlock hidden customer insights you can use to refine your campaigns. Are you extracting the data from redemption reports and using it to improve your personalization and customer journey efforts? 

Set up the campaign

In Salesforce Commerce Cloud, set up your campaign with promotion and coupon(s). For coupon generation, you can define a single code (such as “Fall2019”), upload your own series of codes, or ask the system to generate a random series of coupon codes when you want to provide a unique code to each individual. Once the coupons are generated and assigned to the campaign, the codes should be pushed to Marketing Cloud — where they are tied to the email campaign. Similarly, coupon redemption information will be sent back to Marketing Cloud.

Hone your campaigns

Once you’ve completed your coupon campaign, analyzing your coupon redemption data — as well as information on those who didn’t redeem — can provide important insights and information that can be used for future campaigns, so they are more focused and effective.

For instance, let’s say that you’re an outdoor apparel brand and have just completed a campaign focused on a new line of summer camping gear. We can use information from those customers including location, purchase history, and other data points you’ve captured about them in the past, and add them to an upcoming campaign targeting a complementary line of gear for fall — driving gross merchandise volume, improving margins, as well as increasing customer satisfaction with more personalized, targeted communications.

Inform your segmentation strategy

A second benefit of using coupon redemption is extracting information about the customer demographics and behavioral identifiers that can help inform your customer segmentation strategy. You can use this information to revise and create new customer segments that are more personalized.

For example, you may dig into the data and identify geolocation trends in your customers’ purchase behaviors, including average order value (AOV) and brand preferences. You could take that into account during your planning for an upcoming west coast campaign. This data can help you determine the target price point and the product lines you showcase. As a result, not only do you meet your sales goals, but you also make your customers happy with a great experience: by providing products that are more intriguing to them at an attractive price point.

Salesforce Commerce Cloud and Marketing Cloud customers are set up for success in implementing connected coupon campaigns. A user-friendly Solution Kit outlines the processes and requirements needed to connect Salesforce Commerce Cloud to Marketing Cloud, so you can easily track your coupon redemptions and take action based on the data.

This Coupon Redemption Solution Kit also includes configurations for sending personalized behavioral messages such as emails targeted to past purchase behavior and shopper interactions on the site. You can use these messages to give shoppers an incentive to return and buy new products or to gather important information about their overall shopping experience.

In the next post of this series, my colleague, Abraham David Lloyd, will get more into the specifics to ensure you’re set up to take advantage of some of these ideas.

Get more ways to jumpstart growth in commerce.