Promo codes are powerful tools for admins to build and create all sorts of programs to improve conversion performance and add more paying users to your community. We’ve built promo codes for communities of all types to easily activate, target, and grow their membership offering.
To start, it’s important to think about how you’re going to judge success. What KPIs should you look at relative to this feature? Here’s a great place to start:
- Conversion Rate Over Time: Does your promo code activation improve the conversion rate?
- Number of Redemptions: How many times is a given promo code redeemed? I.e. if your max redemptions is marked as “50” did you hit that goal?
- MRR Growth: Do you see growth in your Monthly Recurring Revenue?
- LTV Performance: Are users going to “stick” after they sign-on and pay for their first month?
We’ve come up with a couple of different ideas that’ll help you think through a couple of different ways that you can activate promo codes for your community membership:
Add Promo Codes To Your Email Drip Campaign
One of the simplest executions is to create a long-lasting use of a promo code is to serve the code in a drip campaign for new users that drop out of the checkout experience on initial sign up. For those new folks that don’t opt to purchase your membership, use our Webhooks or Zapier Integration to send all data to your email tool of choice.
When you design your drip campaign, create one (or two possibly!) emails that are purely focused on promoting the promo code that you’d like to use for re-activation. Make sure the messaging is clear to the recipient and don’t hesitate to give away a big chunk of their first month. They weren’t convinced in the checkout experience that the community was worth paying for, so make sure you’re giving a generous amount to get them over the hump!
Use Promo Codes For VIP Community Members
Because a code can be created for an individual user ONLY (meaning that you can specify that only a specific user can redeem a specific code) you may want to offer some of your tight-knit users a special rate on their first month.
This works extremely well if you’re building a brand new membership offering and launching for the first time and/or working to migrate users away from an old tool to your new tool (Honeycommb) for their first sign-up.
Create Exclusive Programs To Drive Demand
One of the features within the Promo Code toolset is the ability to create a maximum number of redemptions OR an expiration date to the code or promotion that you’re running. So, in the case that you want to create some more exclusivity around that program, leverage an expiration date and/or create a certain number of redemptions that are allowed for a specific code.
Be Channel Specific In Marketing Your Community Membership
The power of promo codes in the use of tracking via the channel is the ability to know where a user is coming from and understanding the redemption performance.
As an example, say that you wanted to create a 10% off promotion that you run on your social channels. You can create something along the lines of…
- Facebook: 10OFFFB
- YouTube: 10OFFYT
- Instagram: 10OFFIG
- Twitter: 10OFFTW
Then, on the backend, you’ll be able to delineate that Facebook drove 100 redemptions, YouTube had 37, Instagram gave you 59 and Twitter had 44 as all of your promotion codes help build separate acquisition funnels based on channels.
Build A Creative Community Membership Referral System
Because you can create an unlimited number of codes associated with an individual promotion, you could work with influencers or referrers alike to create a program whereas you provide unique codes to the referrer (or influencer) that they then use to promote your membership program. You’ll be able to directly tie the performance of that code back to the influencer as you can see (using the Control Center) the number of times that the code has been redeemed.
To execute on a program like this, think through the following:
- How are you going to allow users or influencers to request a code? Using a google doc is a great idea 🙂
- How are you going to create the right incentives for folks to share? Do you send them a certain dollar amount for every referral?
- Is there a timetable that your referral program is tied to?
- What is the correlation with your membership offering? Is this a forever thing, or will you just do this tied to a specific campaign? In which case you’ll want to use expiration dates or redemption limits.
- Is there a specific naming convention that you are going to use for these codes?
As a starting place – this will get you off the ground!
Looking for information about Community Membership for your Community? Read our Knowledgebase, or reach out to Honeycommb today to get started and chat with our team about how to monetize your users. Book a Demo to see what we can build together for your people!
