A lot of Top Right customers have been asking how to use the new Single Use Coupon Codes in Email Marketing (it's a new feature from Yahoo! Merchant Solutions). We posted a new How-To in our interactive online help system.
The new coupon code feature is popular and lots of Yahoo! stores probably are curious about how to use them in email marketing. So, we've taken the tutorial, added a bit more background and posted it here on the blog. Really any Yahoo! store with a subscription to Top Right Basic can do what is described below.
A little background first. Top Right provides an integrated email marketing solution for Yahoo! stores. You connect your store to Top Right and Top Right provides a customer database and email marketing program (the part that sends and tracks the email campaigns). The key is that for each one of your customers you can track attributes. In this example we talk about how to use "Total Value of Purchases" and "Last Purchase Date" to target VIP customers. Feel free to post comments with questions.
Step 1. Figure out who is going to get a coupon.
On the official Yahoo! Store Blog article Coupon Manager Gets an Upgrade and Introduces Single-Use Coupons, they provide some ideas on who you might want to target. In their example, they say the following:
"Let's say you want to launch an email campaign to a set of 500 customers who have bought big-ticket items from you in the past, but haven't bought from you recently. You want to create a generous offer because these customers need motivation for shopping with you again. You decide to create a 25% off coupon with no minimum order amount. Without single-use coupons, you'd risk this offer possibly being posted to a coupon or social networking site, forwarded via email from friend to friend, or used repeatedly by the same customers. Single-use coupons allow you to create more aggressive offers for appropriate customer segments, limiting your risk by knowing that each coupon you send out can only be used once."
I like the way the Yahoo! folks are thinking. I think single use coupons are extraordinarily valuable for rewarding your VIP customers.
Keep in mind, with your Top Right basic subscription you have easy and direct access to how much each customer has spent with you, when they made their last purchases, what products they purchased and more. So, you can easily create a wide array segments. All it requires is a little up front thought. The point and click interface makes the rest pretty easy. You can also use your free Top Right dashboard to identify what makes a VIP customer by looking at what the average customer spends with you, how many times the average customer purchases and so forth. It's a subtle but very powerful tool.
In this example we are going to target customers who have spent more than $500 and haven't made a purchase in a year or longer.
Step 2. Export/Download that list from the email tool.
We are going to export everyone who has spent $500 or more and has not purchased in a year or more. To do this we are going to first create the segment of customers who fit the criteria. This is easy to do in the email tool. We'll use the attributes Total Value of Purchases and Last Purchase Date. Top Right populates those attributes for each of your customers automatically with your subscription to Top Right Basic. Once we create the segment, we'll get the list of email addresses.
2.1. Log into your email marketing tool by clicking Launch Email Marketing from the Top Right dashboard.2.2. Once in your store's list, click on Segments under Advanced Features.
2.3. Name your Segment (in this case we say VIPs) and click on Add Demographic Restriction.
2.4. Click on Total Value of Purchases. A window will pop up. Enter 500 and select the greater than option. The image below shows how it should look:
Click Next.2.5. Click on Add Demographic Restriction again. Click on Last Purchase Date. Enter 4/15/08 in the To field (we are creating this tutorial on 4/16/09) as shown below.
Click Next.2.6. Click Save& Finish
Click View Results.
Click Generate report now - I will wait.
Click Download Addresses
You can either wait for the results or have them sent to your email after they are compiled.
Step 3. Create the number of coupons you need.
Since you are an experienced Yahoo! Merchant Solutions user, I am going to point you to the help at Merchant Solutions. You should create the number of coupons to match the number of active emails, in this case 52.
Step 4. Append the coupon codes to the email list.
This step involves adding a column to the spreadsheet (csv) that contains your VIP list email addresses. Then, you paste the coupon codes that you created in Merchant Solutions into the new column. Each email address will have a unique coupon code associated with it.
4.1. Open up the email list that you either downloaded or had sent to you in Step 2 and the coupon code list.4.2. In the email field, name a column Coupon Code (or something like that).
4.3. Copy and paste the coupon codes from the coupon codes list into the email list. Each Email Address should have a unique coupon code next to it in the spreadsheet.
Save the list as CSV.
Step 5. Import the email list into the email tool.
The primary way to add emails to your list is via the connection between the Top Right Customer Database and the Top Right Email Tool - it happens with a few clicks. However, you can also add or update email addresses using the upload feature in the email. People use this to upload lists they get from their retail stores or conferences. In this case we are using the upload feature to append the new column.
The screen below shows what it will look like. Make sure to update information for addresses that already exist.
Step 6. Create, Target and Send your message. Using Top Right, you can create, target, send and report on email messages. The tool will walk you through the wizard. In that way, it's very similar to other tools. The key difference is that the data is all there for you to use. Just remember that you only want to send this to the VIPs segment that we created in Step 2. If you are familiar with "Mail Merge" in Microsoft Word, then you should have no problem getting the coupons to appear dynamically with a click. It's pretty straightforward.
6.1. At the Settings stage (the 1st step), make sure to select the VIPs segment:
6.2. In this example, we assume that you've created the HTML message and are just looking to insert the code. There are other tutorials for "How To" create a basic email message etc.
Use "Mail Merge" to insert the coupon code dynamically into each message. In the "Edit HTML" screen, put your cursor where you want the coupon code to appear in your message and insert the code using the button at the right.
Or...
Use the built-in HTML Editor and the mail merge feature.
Once you do that for the HTML version, the text version is self-explanatory.
Step 7. Schedule like you normally would and you are done.
