How To Fulfill Targeted Offers To Hear More Ka-Chings!

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All of us receive spammy offers from banks, consumer brands, ecommerce websites, retailers and many other businesses. If you’re like me, you probably delete these SMS / email messages without even opening them.

Once in a while, we get a discount coupon on our birthday or wedding anniversary. They are more targeted but we still consign them to the spam folder because we’re conditioned to receiving gifts on Major Life Events and discounts don’t cut it.

It’s rarely that we get an offer that makes total sense to us at the point of receiving it e.g. 20% off on Coke just after buying a pizza; offer to restructure a high value credit card purchase into six equated monthly installments, and so on.

The recent launch of Apple iBeacon has raised the potential of – and the buzz around – targeted offers to the next level and we should be hearing more about this going forward.

Now, cue to what happens when we redeem a targeted offer.

When I did that recently, I went around in circles:

  1. A taxi hailing app sent me a discount code that I wasn’t able to remember when I next ordered its cab. More on this at Walking The Tightrope Between Driving Repeat Purchase And Rewarding Loyalty
  2. One offer app installed on my smartphone correctly recognized my location (Kalyaninagar, Pune, India) and showed me a 30% discount offer for a burger from a nearby restaurant, with delivery charges waived for good measure. When I tapped on the REDEEM OFFER button, the app took me to the quick service restaurant’s website to place my order. But the outlet was located 2,500 kms away (in Gurgaon, India, BTW). Needless to say, the website declined home delivery since my address was outside its delivery radius of three kilometers. To add salt to the wound, the QSR informed me that the offer had expired five months earlier
  3. Another offer app sent me a very compelling targeted offer in a certain mall. When I tapped the offer’s PUSH notification on my Android’s notification bar to redeem it, the app generated *ALL* offers in the said mall. There were 50 of them. I bailed out because I didn’t want to spend the time to locate the one offer that had sparked my interest among the clutter of 50 offers.

Going by my datapoint of three, it’s hard, if not outrightly impossible, to redeem targeted offers from most brands.

Brands lose sales when consumers are unable to cash out on offers. They also risk alienating their brand loyalists and converting them into brand antagonists. When ditched consumers take to social media to share their negative brand experience, that could prove costly for brands.

That said, there are brands that go out of the way to ensure that consumers can easily redeem their targeted offers.

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Go Daddy is one of them.

The world’s #1 domain registrar recently sent me an email with an offer for 20% discount on my next order. Since I was in the market for a new domain name, the offer caught my eye immediately. My interest went up a notch when I noticed that the promo code given in the email was clickable (yes, I notice such things). Therefore, I went ahead and clicked the link. I was taken to Go Daddy’s website, where I logged in with my credentials.

Now, if you’ve shopped for domain names, you’d know that the purchase funnel comprises of several steps viz. (a) enter the domain name (e.g. VacationRentals.com) (b) check availability (c) select the term (e.g. 5 years) (d) enter nameserver details (e.g. NS183.HOSTGATOR.COM) (e) punch in the credit card details (f) add promo code, and, finally (g) click the BUY button.

At the last step, the website applied my promo code automatically.

I whipped out my calculator (yes, I do that a lot, too) and satisfied myself that I’d received the promised 20% discount.

Go Daddy didn’t ask for my promo code at any stage. It had remembered – or “persisted” in geekspeak – my promo code.

Now, persistence per se is not a big deal. Many websites do it. In If You Must Use A Long Form, At Least Pre-Fill As Much Of It As You Can, I’d described my experience with a certain brand. When I clicked its Promoted Tweet, I was taken to the brand’s microsite. I saw the registration form prefilled almost fully. This was possible because the brand had persisted the ID received from Twitter and applied it on its microsite without asking the user to do it.

However, in all examples of persistence that I’ve come across, the data is persisted only for one click i.e. until the landing page that immediately follows the click of the link.

In contrast, Go Daddy persisted the promo code for three clicks beyond the landing page. For the lack of any better expression, I’m going to call this “Multiclick Persistence”.

Kudos to Go Daddy for going the extra mile to implement this technology, which resulted in one of the best fulfillment experiences of a targeted offer that I’ve ever come across. I’m sure the company is reaping a rich harvest by enjoying above-average redemption rates for its offers.

Ka-Ching!