Ready to take your discount experience to the next level? 

AIQ’s Unique Coupon Code Generator, the newest addition to our Discount feature, brings the power of single use redemptions to our platform for Shopify, WooCommerce and BigCommerce retailers. With this new alternative to traditional, static discounts, users can create limited volumes of unique codes to better manage and control the customer redemption process. 

AIQ Unique Coupon Code Offers & Static Discounts Buildout Options

Our Unique Coupon Code Offer come with the same extensive discount options available with AIQ’s traditional Discount features, supporting highly segmented targeting and strategic buildouts that truly transform your customer experience.

• $ Off Rewards: Establish $ amount to take off cart total 
• % Off Deals: Input a flat total % to discount cart total
• Redeem Points for Discounts: Require specific points balance to redeem offer 
• Custom Expiration Options: Select specific data & time stamp OR relative timing for discount expiration
• Cooldown Periods for Reusable Discounts: Enable discounts to be redeemed more than once with cooldown periods available to put time in between redemptions. Both hour & day time frames are available. 

Unique Use Cases of Unique Coupon Codes

• Automate limited availability promotions: Think ‘Grand Opening Special: First 50 customers get $50 reward.” With this new feature, the amount of codes generated reflects the number of customers this offer will be sent to. This gives retailers significant control over redemption count without the heavy lifting. 

• Cap steep discounts for limited-time incentive: Retail periods that experience upticks in foot traffic, like black Friday for example, are a great time to launch aggressive win-back campaigns as a means to bring back gone customers while leveraging your big promotions. By utilizing unique coupon codes. 

Attaching an AIQ Discount to Your Marketing Campaign

Alongside this, both static discounts and unique coupon offers can be attached to any AIQ Campaign. Simply attach the Discount Macro associated with the offer, and we’ll notify your customers directly when a new offer is available upon falling into the target audience.

The reward offer also gets added into the customer’s Web or Native App Wallet at the same time they’re being sent the message. Offers built with AIQ Discounts are added to customer wallets the moment they fall into the audience attached to the reward, just like campaigns.

By combining the use of campaigns and discount offers to target the same audience, customers are able to be personally notified that a new discount is available, while ensuring it’s easy to acess and readily available to redeem directly in their AIQ rewards wallet.

Attaching discounts to AIQ Campaigns is great for promoting: 

• Abandoned Cart Incentives
• Customer Win-back Offers
• New Customer Opt-In Rewards
• Exclusive Loyalty Member Perks

Here’s how to add unique coupon code offers to your AIQ Campaigns:

Now, let’s explore exactly how to start building your unique coupon code offers in the AIQ platform so you can begin leveraging this exciting new feature.

Building a Discount With AIQ’s Unique Coupon Code Generator

• Step 1: Create target audience via AIQ Audiences

• Step 2: Create new discount in AIQ Discounts builder, targeting the audience made in step 1. Begin by filling out discount information on page 1 of the builder followed by designing your discount on page 2.

Before you move forward, make sure you click ‘Create’ in the upper right corner before proceeding, otherwise the unique coupon code generator won’t run.

• Step 3: Next, you’ll select your redemption method on page 3 and begin creating your unique coupon codes.

• Step 4: Proceed to the discount review page & click ‘save’ in the upper right corner once complete. 

Learn more about our brand new AIQ Discounts Unique Coupon Code Generator and more by connecting with our team today!

Looking for a refresh on static AIQ Discounts? Walkthrough the buildout process and feature breakdown by checking out our Product Session below.

However, email marketing still has to deal with avoiding spam filters. According to Statista, spam emails account for nearly half (47.3%) of email traffic globally—and your carefully crafted email marketing campaign could be one of them.

How do you avoid email spam filters? In what ways could your email be considered spam?

What Is spam and how is it detected?

Spam, in the context of marketing, is unsolicited messages that are sent to recipients in bulk. As such, spam emails are also known as Unsolicited Bulk Email (UBE).

Spam messages are detected by spam filters. These filters work by sifting each email and putting them up against a list of criteria to determine whether it’s spam or not. If it’s considered spam, it will go straight to your Spam or Junk folder. 

Another way spam messages are discovered are through email firewalls. They function the same way as spam filters, but the main difference is that if your email is flagged as spam and reported as such several times, your IP address and domain name will be communicated with other firewalls, blocking all incoming emails from you.

Spam Laws

Unintentionally creating and sending spam-like email marketing campaigns can be damaging to your reputation. Additionally, if your organization does not comply with spam laws, you could also face serious penalties, including civil and criminal charges.

Each country has different laws and policies in place for commercial emails; for example, the United States has CAN-SPAM and Canada has CASL. Here are the things you need to know about these two laws:

1. CAN-SPAM

CAN-SPAM is the short name for the United States’ Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography And Marketing Act of 2003, which is enforced by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). The Act aims to protect consumers from any unsolicited business emails, regardless if they were sent in bulk or not. 

Additionally, not all B2B or B2C emails are considered part of the coverage of CAN-SPAM. Emails that are transactional in nature are exempted—for example, following up an ongoing transaction. For emails that have both commercial and transactional content, the primary purpose of the email will be the deciding factor

Penalties

CAN-SPAM has heavy penalties for non-compliance, amounting to $43,792 for each separate email in violation. And if there is more than one organization involved, all of them can be held responsible. 

Additional fines might also be incurred if aggravated violations are also present in the case, as well as criminal penalties and imprisonment. Among these violations are any fraudulent ways to digitally access or use the information for commercial gain.

How to avoid violating CAN-SPAM Laws:

The FTC specified 7 main requirements for commercial emails:

1. Keep your header information accurate: This applies to the information in your “From,” “To,” and “Reply to” fields, as well as the domain name and email address.
2. Be honest with your subject lines: It must clearly and concisely describe the contents of your email.
3. Be honest that the message is an ad: You must also be honest that your message is commercial in nature. It can be as simple as including a fine print that says, “This advertisement is brought to you by XYZ Corp.”
4. Disclose your business location: You must include a valid, current, and accurate physical address of your business. PO boxes can also be used.
5. Must include an opt-out notice: Provide a conspicuous notice in the email, clearly stating how recipients can opt-out of any future emails at any time. Opting out must also be easy and straightforward to do—for example, requiring only one or two clicks to do so.
6. Honor opt-out requests within 10 business days: These requests must be promptly and unconditionally honored.
7. Be sure that third-party email marketing tools/solutions you use are compliant: It is your legal responsibility to check and ensure that all aspects of CAN-SPAM are being followed.  

2. CASL (Canada)

Canada’s Anti-Spam Legislation (CASL) regulates and outlines safe practices in email marketing to protect both businesses and individuals from spam and other digital threats. 

CASL is reinforced by the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC), and it applies to commercial messages sent by Canadian and global organizations to Canadian recipients. As opposed to CAN-SPAM, CASL is a more recent law, created in 2014, and is considered as one of the toughest yet most effective laws concerning spam. What sets it apart from other laws is its stringent requirement for people to opt-in—that is, you must have consent from recipients before you can send commercial emails to them.

Penalties

Penalties under CASL are quite severe, consisting of fines up to $1 million for individual violators and up to a staggering $10 million for corporations. This amount applies to each violation. 

In addition to the heavy fines, victims can sue for damages if actual harm or loss after receiving the spam message is proven. Organizations are also subject to vicarious liability for any wrongful acts done by the company itself, its employees, or any third parties they work with in relation to email marketing.

How to avoid violating CASL Laws:

To summarize, CASL requires organizations sending commercial messages the following:

1. Clear identifying information about their business is provided in the message, including the company name, current physical address, and contact information.
2. Express and implied consent are knowingly given by the customers before organizations can send them commercial messages. Records of the consent must also be kept (i.e., date, location, and manner).
   1. Express consent refers to recipients saying yes to email opt-ins. It also includes any verbal or written consent to receive emails from the company. There is no expiration for this type of consent but it can be revoked by the recipient at any time.
   2. Implied consent refers to certain activities with the customer that imply being in agreement with the company to receive emails. CASL stipulates that the validity for implied consent for a purchase is 2 years; consent for an inquiry, 6 months. Once the consent expires, the contact information of the recipient must be removed from the mailing list.
3. All messages must have a clear and straightforward unsubscribe option. All opt-out requests must also be honored within 10 business days.

Spam filters and how to avoid them 

While every spam filter, email firewall, and spam law are different from one another, there are certain widely accepted best practices in sending commercial emails. Here are a few tips on how to avoid having your email flagged by spam filters: 

1. Boost IP Address Reputation and Sender Score

The reputation of your IP address is one of the factors in determining whether your email is safe or not. Email providers use your Sender Score (also known as IP reputation, IP score, or email sender reputation) to gauge if your email should be filtered to the spam folder or sent to your inbox.

If your IP address is new, consider IP Warming:

Mailbox providers view emails from a new IP address as suspicious until they establish a positive sending reputation, which can take between 4-8 weeks. Warming could take longer if email providers perceive the email as “unwanted” by the recipient. This is why Alpine IQ recommends starting with your best-performing messages or campaigns to your highest engaged audience. The goal during the warm-up process is to send to your subscribers who are least likely to bounce or complain. During your IP warm-up, the more consistent you are with volume, frequency, complaint, and bounce levels, the faster you will establish a positive sending reputation.

IP Warm-up Plan:

• Weeks 1 & 2:
  Send frequently to your most active subscribers – those who have opened/clicked, or opted-in within the past 30 days
• Weeks 3 & 4:
  Expand to subscribers who have opened/clicked, or opted-in within the past 60 days
• Weeks 5 & 6:
  Expand to subscribers who have opened/clicked, or opted-in within the past 90 days

A few other factors that could also affect your Sender Score are the following:

• Having a high hard bounce rate, which refers to failed email deliveries, such as the recipient’s email address being invalid or incorrectly spelled.
  Pro Tip: To avoid hard bounces, make sure you are cleaning your lists often. There are email verify softwares availble that can bulk verify.
• Using purchased email lists and thus giving you low recipient engagement and more spam complaints.
• Sending poor-quality content.

2. Ensure all metadata is accurate

Metadata in emails is the information in the Date, From, To, and Subject of your email.

Spam filters are more likely to flag your email if it’s addressed to your recipient’s email address and not their name. Alpine IQ recommends that you use our macros to personalize the “To:” field of your email. Also, spam filters will check if your recipients already know you. This is why it is important to use a verified domain to send your messages.

Having misleading metadata or thumbnails in your email could lead to your message being filtered as spam. Additionally, any misleading information that’s intended to trick users into believing the content to be something else is against both CAN-SPAM and CASL laws.

3. Remove excess code

The code behind the email templates you use must be kept simple and clean. Having a messy code, including broken or incomplete tags, could prompt spam filters to flag your email. 

4. Tailor your content to boost engagement

We briefly mentioned earlier that recipient engagement is a factor in determining Sender Score. A practical tactic to boost engagement is to segment your subscribers and then tailor your email content to their interests, needs, and preferences. In a study, it has been found that 72% of consumers prefer to engage with personalized messages over generic ones.

5. Provide quality email content 

The quality of the content constitutes the majority of the factors in determining whether an email is spam. Here are some tips to avoid being flagged by spam filters:

• URLs: Use descriptive text instead of naked URLs as the link text. Avoid using URL shorteners as well. 
• Links: Make sure all links included in your email are working properly.
• Images and text: Balance the ratio of images to text and links to texts. Be also sure that images are mobile-responsive and are optimized for web viewing.
• Grammar and spelling: Emails with poor grammar and spelling errors could make it appear unprofessional, and recipients may likely report your email as spam.
• Trigger words: Avoid spam trigger words and, as mentioned earlier, make sure that your subject lines are accurate and honest. There’s an exhaustive list of trigger words (nearly a thousand!), but here are a few to give you an idea:
  • Calls to action that denote a sense of urgency: Act now / hurry / open this
  • Competitions: Congratulations / you’re a winner!
  • E-commerce: Order today / wants credit card
  • Financial: Double your income / earn extra cash
  • Health: Lose weight / life insurance / Viagra
  • Marketing: Dear friend / 100% free / free sample
  • Special offers: For you / instant access
  • Sales: For only (amount) / join millions / save big

6. Properly format your email 

Another factor is the formatting of your email. An unprofessionally formatted email does not only make your content look spammy, but it also affects your bounce rate and engagement. Avoid the following formatting mistakes as much as possible:

• Using all caps
• Using multiple punctuations (e.g., “Hello!!!!” or “What do you think?!?”)
• Using too many colors
• Using too many different font styles and/or font sizes

Professionally Craft Your Email Marketing Campaigns

A lot of effort goes into email marketing campaigns, and being mindful of whether you’re compliant with spam laws is just one of its many facets. One way to streamline your process is to work with professional marketing solutions providers like Alpine IQ. 

All our solutions are backed by stringent security measures to make sure that your data and that of your clients’ are safe and secure. Our email marketing service, in particular, is equipped with the best tools to efficiently automate your email campaigns for you. We also ensure that every email you send is compliant with spam and data security laws. 

To get the latest updates on our suite of services, make sure to subscribe to our blog today!

Will your customers use their points to receive a percentage off future orders or a specific amount of currency off future orders? Which option is right for the business and why? 

Before we go into which option is better for your business, let’s take a look at the famous rule of 100 by Jonah Berger. 

“The Rule of 100 says that under 100 percentage discounts seem larger than absolute ones.  But over 100, things reverse.  Over 100, absolute discounts seem larger than percentage ones.”

• Jonah Berger, Marketing Professor and Author of Contagious 

Jonah Berger’s strategy works best when it is paralleled with either tiered discounts or custom discounts. 

What’s the difference? 

Tiered discounts refer to the customer reward journey. When your customer opens up their Wallet, they have a series of offers. These offers function as deals. if your customer is willing to spend a certain amount of money, they’ll be rewarded with points. These points can be utilized towards future purchases.  If customers choose to redeem their points for percentages off future purchases, your company should give significant discounts such as 25% off purchases of orders over $500 dollars. This will encourage customers to spend more money for a greater discount. A key benefit of this structure is that every customer has access to the same rewards journey. If your customer utilizes their 25% off discount, they may refer a friend to co-purchase. 

Custom discounts are special discounts that can be given to customers to either make them feel special or increase customer satisfaction. For example, if a customer complains about services and products received, your businesses’ customer support team can rectify the situation and give more points in the form of a custom discount. Custom discounts can also be used to control inventory. If your operations team is struggling to sell a particular product, use custom discounts to move more units of a specific product. These custom discounts can be given to customers who have completed their tiered discount journey.  

The Rule of 100 helps us understand how customers perceive deals. Getting people to spend more than they normally would is an art and a science. Here are three actionable pointers to decide whether your business should give customers the opportunity to redeem their points for percentages off purchase or a specified amount of currency off of purchases. 

Creating a Budget For Discounts  

Unlike Oprah, most businesses aren’t financially able to give away products. Collaborate with your operations team and supply chain leaders to decide if points should be used for percent off orders or currency off orders. If your business offers absolutes (currency) then you’ll want to consider product margins and profit margins. How much do you pay your supplier for specific products and what is the profit margin from each of those sales? 

Unify Sales And Marketing Data  

When your customer opens their wallet, they’ll have a journey waiting for them. Some customers may receive special discounts (birthday) while all customers are provided the same reward journey. Alpine IQ unifies all of your data in one place for your business analysts and marketing teams to perform cluster analyses. After implementing specific reward structures, listen to your customers through the data. 

Utilize Your PR Team 

If your retail team is promoting your loyalty program in-person, use operations data and sales data to discover which clerks drive the most adoption for your program. Have your team ask customers which they prefer: percentage off or currency off future purchases. You don’t need a public relations firm to help your organization build mutually beneficial relationships with the public. Your clerks are your primary PR team. Empower them to use Alpine IQ’s online technology to power their offline efforts. 

Your company’s financial performance will be sculpted by the type of loyalty program you deploy. To differentiate yourself from your competitors and grow your business, align Alpine IQ’s loyalty technology with your business’ goals to power your most important work and grow your business.

To get the latest updates on our suite of services, make sure to subscribe to our blog today!

• Backups.
• Contact cookie syncing with programmatic vendors such as LiveRamp, Kochava, TradeDesk.
• As a constant source for marketing teams to gather files from in order to sync to FB, TikTok, Twitter, Google audience builders.

Tutorial:

Navigate to AWS and go to your S3 service homepage. You will now need to create a bucket where you want your files to be stored within/ sync’d to.

Add your bucket name and select a region:

Turn off “Block all public access” and consent at the bottom where necessary (Alpine IQ is a 3rd party that will need access. We will restrict access via IAM policies shortly):

Next we will change the bucket policy. Under the permissions tab you will see a bucket policy section. Copy and paste the following JSON code into the bucket policy section. Please make sure to change your account ID + bucket names where the placeholders are:

– Placeholders are: yourAccountID and bucketName

{
    "Version": "2012-10-17",
    "Statement": [
        {
            "Sid": "DelegateS3Access",
            "Effect": "Allow",
            "Principal": {
                "AWS": "arn:aws:iam::yourAccountID:root"
            },
            "Action": [
                "s3:DeleteObject",
                "s3:GetBucketLocation",
                "s3:GetObject",
                "s3:ListBucket",
                "s3:PutObject"
            ],
            "Resource": [
                "arn:aws:s3:::bucketName”,
                "arn:aws:s3:::bucketName/*"
            ]
        }
    ]
}

After you save we will now go to the AWS “IAM” service to add your user that will have access to this bucket. Go there now, then head to the users section in the left navigation bar. Click on “Add user” and select programmatic access. Please note that if you are just going to use this for Alpine IQ, go ahead and make the user “alpineiq” so that it is easier to track and control your security protocols. Please download the access key + access secret credentials when you have completed creating this user. You will need it at the end of this tutorial.

On Step 2 you will select “Attach existing policies directly” and then click the button in the lower-left corner “Create Policy”.

Then select “JSON” in the tabs from the new window that opens:

Copy and paste the following JSON. Make sure to replace your bucket names where applicable:

{
    "Version": "2012-10-17",
    "Statement": [
        {
            "Sid": "VisualEditor0",
            "Effect": "Allow",
            "Action": [
                "s3:PutObject",
                "s3:GetObject",
                "s3:ListBucket",
                "s3:DeleteObject",
                "s3:GetBucketLocation",
                "s3:PutObjectAcl"
            ],
            "Resource": [
                "arn:aws:s3:::sampleBucket",
                "arn:aws:s3:::sampleBucket/*"
            ]
        }
    ]
}

Congratulations! Your bucket is now setup for us to sync to it. You can make other IAM users to allow 3rd parties access to your backups.

Now all you need to do is head into Alpine IQ and connect AWS S3 as a destination. When connecting your integration you will need the access key + secret for the IAM user + the bucket name and region for us to access. Your CSV files will automatically sync to this bucket by default every 4 hours.

Bucket          // bucket name
Region          // region bucket was created in
AccessKeyID     // your new user's access ID
SecretAccessKey // your new user's secret access key

To get the latest updates on our suite of services, make sure to subscribe to our blog today!