Create More Effective Discounts Using Intelligems Campaigns

The importance of discounts

Discounts are a powerful tool to have in your brand’s toolkit. They create urgency for customers to make a purchase, help drive spikes in revenue, and let you clear out old inventory and turn it into cash.

At Intelligems, we’ve been tracking data across 1,000 Shopify stores and have seen a significant increase in promotions & discount usage in 2023, as well as stronger customer demand for them. Across our dataset, we see conversion rates rising even more during discount periods when compared to 2021 and 2022. In other words, customers have become more price sensitive and elastic. 

Evidently, discounts are a huge asset for e-commerce companies to remain competitive and be successful in today’s market, so let’s talk about how people currently give out promotions. There are two predominant methods depending on what you are trying to achieve. The first is a “site-wide discount”, where everyone who visits your site has access to the discount. The second is a targeted discount, where customers receive a promo code (often through email/SMS or affiliate/influencer). 

Site-wide discounts

For a “site-wide discount,” think something like a 4th of July sale. The offer is plastered everywhere on your site, you’re spending money to drive traffic, and it's very easy for customers to access the discount. 

Advantages

This kind of discount often generates higher conversion rates because the offer is repeatedly reiterated to the customer throughout their experience, and makes it very clear how much they will save.

Disadvantages

1. You're probably spending too much. Since everyone who lands on your site is getting a discount, you're sort of setting off a bazooka. 

2. It's very hard to test, measure, and iterate on your offer since you're spreading it everywhere. How can you reliably measure whether your promotion actually provided incremental profit?

Targeted Discounts

For a targeted discount, think about something like a Klaviyo email discount code sent only to a segment of loyal customers. For example, you give a certain group a promo code for 20% off that they can use for a "friends and family" sale. 

Advantages

These types of discounts are good for a few reasons. Firstly, you can control the audience who can access the deal; you presumably know the size and behavior of that segment, limiting your potential spending. You can also craft a unique offer that you know will be appealing to that segment and have the best ability to test and measure the impact on this group to more accurately understand the incremental impact of the discount. 

Disadvantages

1. You can't really reiterate the offer on the site, which means you're asking the customer to jump to the site and go dig up their code in their inbox later.

2. Promo codes have their own issues:

   • They often leak and are picked up by sites like Honey (which can be hard to notice). 

   • Customers can easily lose them (or forget to apply them) and create customer support tickets.

   • Because of the back and forth between inbox and checkout, you risk getting a higher abandoned cart rate

Intelligems Campaigns

The reason we’re so excited about Intelligems Campaigns is that it blends together the advantages of both site-wide discounts and targeted discounts. Using the Intelligems Campaigns feature, you can build a customized offer/promotion, and expand from there using various other tools to ensure your discount is the best it can be. Here’s why it works so well:

1. Easily target your discount

• If you don't want your offer to apply to everyone who visits your site, you can "contain" it in a link and distribute it to whichever customers you want. 

• You can also set it up so that only traffic from a certain UTM parameter receives that offer.

• Targeted discounts are an extremely powerful lever that most companies are not taking advantage of, especially when you consider how much more price-sensitive people have become over the past two years. Fine-tuning your discounts is a sure way to please your customers while making you more money.
  
  

2. Reiterate the offer on-site

1. Once you create your initial campaign link, you can easily build out personalization (such as pop-ups, changing images, etc) that only appear  to your target audience.

2. The more you emphasize your discount throughout a potential customer's shopping experience, the more likely they are to convert. The details depend on the company; some find success in advertising discounts in the hero image, some by creating a banner or putting out a pop-up. 

3. Bottom line: tell your customers repeatedly.

3. Automatically apply the offer

• This gets rid of the hassle of retrieving promo codes from deep within an inbox.

• For those who have the link, the discount is automatically applied at their checkout with no promo code required. 

• This not only leads to a better overall customer experience but also helps you reach a higher conversion rate - the only thing people like more than discounts are discounts that are automatically applied!

4. Construct AB tests to measure the true impact of the discounts

• More often than not, businesses pick their discounts out of a hat. With Intelligems Campaigns, you can easily see metrics on how different discounts perform. 

• AB test your discount offers to understand your incrementally and profit so you can see if a higher discount, lower discount, or no discount at all works best for your business. 

• Finding the right strategy all comes down to experimentation. With Intelligems, the guesswork is removed, and instead, you can rely on concrete data to strategically run your campaigns. 

You can easily access all of your data through the Intelligems app via Shopify to track all your campaigns. With analytics that show you redemption rates, usage rates, and all sorts of metrics over each campaign, you can really dive into their usefulness and understand how they perform over time. 

Intelligems Campaigns helps you build a robust, precise promotion strategy that costs you less, makes you more, and ensures you aren’t giving away any unnecessary discounts. It also saves you time and allows you to create the most successful, customized campaigns.