How to know if a Special Offer will work for your Campaign

Deciding on your campaign offer can be a daunting task, offers grab the attention of your audience, so are key in lead generation. You may be looking to attract new prospects or nurture and reward existing customers for their loyalty, so it is important to get it right for your specific audience.

There are so many types of offers available now, such as:

• Buy one get one free
• Free content or tools (whitepaper, eBook, templates, calculators)
• Fill in survey for chance to win
• Free postage
• Free trials of products or services
• Discounts by a set percentage
• Spend £50 and get £5 off

The trick is to make an offer valuable to your audience, to do this it should addresses your audience’s problems and needs, wishes and interests.

Right Offer, Right Audience, Right Time

Different types of offer may well be more appropriate at different stages of your sales cycle as well as be determined by your audience. For example:

- To retain existing B2C customers and encourage them to keep buying from you, offers like BOGOF and Free Postage may be the most effective.

- To encourage new prospects to consider your B2B software package, free content (ebook or whitepaper) or a free trial can help progress them through the sales cycle towards purchase.

Testing will help you refine your offers

You likely have a good feeling for the right kind of offer for your target audience, after all you know your products and audience better than anyone. That said customer behaviors are prone to change and develop over time, so the best way to be sure of the relevance of the offer you are planning, is to run a test campaign before sending out to your full data list.

- You may be torn between two different special offers, or just two different percentages of discount – in this case use an AB test where half your test group get one offer and the other half the other offer. This is very easy to do in most email systems and can also be achieved with a little effort for a physical mailing.

- You may believe that the males in your audience will be more responsive to flat discounts whereas the females may be more keen on buy one get one free offers. With some simple segmentation you can split your audience and test the campaign on a sample of the segmented audiences to gauge response rates.

- You may not be sure if a special offer is going to be effective and yield enough responses to make it cost effective for your business. Testing a campaign where half the audience gets the offer and half don’t, will help determine if it yields a significant enough uplift in responses to justify the offer.

SCV for more detailed customer understanding

A Single Customer View is a great tool for better understanding your clients and therefore improving your decision-making, preparation and segmentation around targeting special offers.

With all your customer data pulled together into one database and one view you can gain a more complete picture of your entire audience and the silo’s within it. These groups can be determined by different buying patterns, product preferences, value to your business and much more.

A SCV will also consolidate future campaign data so you can report on the effectiveness of different campaigns and special offers to inform future marketing decisions.

Automation to effectively target your offers

As discussed above, you want to send the Right Offer to the Right Audience at the Right Time to get the best possible response. With the information you already know about your audience (or may assemble through a SCV) you can use Marketing Automation to set up different targeted campaigns to different segments. By not having to manually send and manage multiple, regular campaigns to different segments - you can save valuable time and resources within your marketing team.

For example you may set up a campaign only to new prospects who sign up on your shop site to send:

Another automation route with an AB test on effectiveness of a discount might look like this:

Offers and discounts of any sort can certainly be very effective in lead generation, however the most effective type of offers for your audience, and the different segments within your audience, are best identified through testing.

From here your audience can be split simply into two or three segments by gender, age, job role, buying patterns etc or taken right down to the individual level to target special offers for each individual customer based on certain defined criteria.