5 Steps to Ensure the Success of Your Personalized Offer

April 10, 2020

Tony Coray

Delivering personalized offers is a smart move for brands. But they often don’t see their programs deliver big results, usually for one of two reasons. Their fear of discount abuse keeps them from promoting the offer broadly, or they use manual verification to confirm eligibility, which wastes valuable time and resources and doesn’t scale.

Targus, a leading provider of high-quality laptop and tablet cases and other technology accessories, faced these challenges, but found a way to overcome them and deliver triple-digit year-over-year growth. Their journey provides a roadmap to success.

Laying a Good Foundation for Your Personalized Offer

Targus’ personalized offers were part of their strategy to build customer loyalty by rewarding key customer groups with exclusive discounts. The company got off to a great start by creating rich personalized offers of 25% off all purchases, year-round, for three key consumer tribes: military, students, and teachers.

Then it took the wise step of using digital verification to protect the offers. Customers coming to Targus’ website were instantly verified as part of the purchase process. But Targus missed the final, important step to having a successful offer—fully promoting it.

When Jon Pickard came on board as senior manager of eCommerce for Targus, he saw a huge opportunity to take the company’s personalized offers to the next level by engaging in a more robust identity marketing strategy.

Developing a Campaign Worthy of Your Offer and Your Audience

Jon and his team created landing pages for each of the consumer tribes that promoted the offers using language that appealed to each group and underscored the company’s commitment to them, using words like recognizing, thanking, honoring and saluting.

They also:

Included evergreen links in the Targus’ Twitter account to all the discounts.
Strategically featured the offers on their home page.
Used social media campaigns to promote the discounts during relevant holidays, such as Veterans Day and Teacher Appreciation Week.

The company also placed box inserts in each order shipment to let customers know they could take advantage of the military, student, or teacher discounts on future orders, if they qualified.

Reaping the Rewards of Going Big

Marketing the offers more aggressively delivered remarkable results—triple-digit, year-over-year growth in both revenue and orders for all three consumer tribes. And when compared to the sitewide average, landing page conversions for the offers increased 105%.

How to Ensure the Success of Your Personalized Offer

Targus saw such incredible results because it adhered to five best practices that every brand can follow.

01 Choose the Right Consumer Tribe

Start by determining which customers will gravitate toward your brand and are worth investing in to build long-term loyalty. For Targus, students were a natural niche that fit perfectly with their product line. Additionally, the company made a strategic decision to recognize and honor the valuable services that teachers and the military provide.

02 Secure Your Offer

The most successful personalized promotions are protected by digital verification. This relatively simple step immediately reduces the staff resources required to manage personalized offers. It also prevents discount abuse. Knowing their margins were protected gave Targus the confidence it needed to market the offers aggressively—and reap big results.

03 Use Messaging That Resonates

A personalized offer needs to be just that – personalized. This means creating promotions that express genuine regard for the customers you’re engaging. Targus’ landing pages were so successful because their message appealed to each of the consumer tribes they were targeting.

04 Provide an Easy, In-Brand Experience

Once a customer arrives at your website to redeem your offers, make sure they stay there. Forcing them to leave to be verified by a third-party vendor creates friction and gives the vendor your customers’ data—arguably the most valuable part of the transaction. Targus’ verification process was entirely in-brand and gave it the data it needed to nurture customer loyalty.

05 Support the Offer with Smart Marketing

Steps one through four are all for naught if you don’t get the word out about your offer. Targus began seeing real results when they more fully promoted their offers across multiple channels, from social media to physical box inserts. Pick the marketing channels that will reach your target customers and watch your identity marketing take off.