Discount Voucher Codes

Discount Voucher Codes

List of contents:

What are discount voucher codes?

The voucher code, also known as a promotional code, is an alphanumeric string provided by the brand/business side to the customers to enter it at the checkouts to obtain a certain discount over services or products. The code can be auto-generated random characters like “CCHJR3” or it can be related to the occasion of the voucher; for example, “Sep50” is a promotional code that offers 50% off through September. There are many forms of voucher codes serving your aims: 

  • One-time use promo codes: Such vouchers are created for specific customers. Those customers, VIP or loyal, receive the codes via many methods; email, postal mail, or social media accounts to use them once. The codes are not for public consumption. 
  • Personal referral codes: To motivate your customers so they invite their friends and relatives to use the services you provide, you can offer them personal codes. When the codes are used, your customers get a discount.
  • Pre launch codes: When a business launches new services or products, they may create vouchers to promote them by giving away a limited discount for early bookings. For example, the first 10 customers who book the new service get 40% off.
  • Exit-Intent offer: Last seconds can make miracles, that’s why marketers love the challenge of converting visitors to customers through the pop-up ad that appears directly before they leave the website or tab, providing them promo codes discounts to complete their purchase. 
  • Influencer offers: Since influencer marketing is now mainstream and became a part of most of the campaigns, this type of social media marketing depends on online influencers and celebrities that have a lot of followers. So, different brands use their popularity to promote their services and/or products. This can be done through a promo code given from the influencers to their followers holding the influencer’s name, for example, “Sara20” so the brand gets to know how successful the campaign was based on the number of the used promo codes. 

Purpose of creating voucher codes

  • Increase sales: The promotional codes encourage both your existing customers and the potential customers to book your service or to make an order and that will affect your sales rate positively. 
  • Better understanding for your customers: And that can be through influencer marketing where you cooperate with celebrities and famous social media influencers to promote your promo code among their followers. And through this process, you can define many characteristics of your customers, like the platforms they use the most, the type of celebrities they are following, and the common interests they have. 
  • Encourage existing customers to try new services/products: When you create a new voucher code for specific services, or for some products you have that motivates your existing customers who have been booking certain services for a long time to try new options your business offers and that can turn them to permanent customers of these services too.
  • Convert tentative fans: Usually, the potential customers of a brand pass through a process to make the purchase decision. The voucher codes can have a great influence to make the process of the consumer decision much faster because the limited time offers to make the consumers worry about missing hot deals. 
  • The targeted marketing: The promo codes really help when you tend to have a targeted campaign for selected customers so you send them the codes separately to inform them with their special offer.
  • A compensation method for your customers, You can create particular promotional codes to provide the customers with, as compensation for a delay, mistake, or any other potential issues the customers can face while dealing with your services.

The difference between booking discounts and voucher codes

Discounts are deductions on the original price of the services you provide, so instead of offering a specific service for $50 you set a discount on it to be $35 so the original and the updated prices display to the customers. Also, the discounts can either be online or at your stores. And the customer doesn’t need to apply any code or do any further steps to enjoy the discount as the booked services would be calculated in the discounted price. 

Voucher codes, on the other hand, require the customers to use the provided codes in order to get the offer. So, if there are advertised promotional codes for a city, for certain products, or for specific criteria of the customers, the discount would be applied only when the code is entered during checkout.  

Who are voucher codes directed to 

You can generate voucher codes for your existing customers to offer them discounts on specific services, within a city or to celebrate certain occasions like mother’s day, Valentine’s day, school season, and other national holidays. The vouchers are not only exclusive for the current customers, Most of the brands usually offer their potential customers encouraging promo codes to have a discount when they use their services for the first time. The voucher codes can also be a sort of cooperation with other brands to promote the services among their customers. EX, a car washing centre provides a promo code for bank customers who pay with their debit card.

Who can generate the voucher codes?

Your admin users can create the voucher codes and it would be visible to all the admin users who have access to the account. Fieldworkers who have access can also generate voucher codes on the account. 

How voucher codes improve your brand’s image?

The voucher codes are good material for your digital marketing activities. You can always include the promotional codes you offer in your social media campaigns, Newsletters, Email marketing, Search engine marketing, and any form of online marketing you use for your business. Highlighting the gestures which your brand cares to provide your customers with enhances your business positively and of course, would pay off regarding the revenues. Also, vouchers can contribute to increasing the word of mouth around the business because, by nature, people tend to make recommendations to their friends specially when it comes to promotions and discounts.

Permissions to create vouchers 

Your admin users are permitted to create vouchers by default. The admin users can give access to any other user role to generate vouchers too. To do so, go to Settings > General Settings > Users, navigate to the Role tab located on the middle top of the page, and clicking on Assign Credentials.

Click on Permission For Settings, press on Ctrl + F on your keyboard, the Find field of your browser will appear, type in Settings Voucher, the permission will be highlighted, after that click on the empty box on the side of the highlighted option and the box will be checked.

After that click on Save located on the bottom right of the page and the user will be able to create Vouchers.

How to create a New Voucher

To create a Voucher as a user with permission: 

From the menu located on the left side using the web browser, click on Settings > Financial Settings > Discount Vouchers 

Then you will be directed to the Discount Vouchers page that contains the list of the existing vouchers, if you are creating your first voucher the voucher list will be empty. To create a new voucher code, click on +Create New Voucher

The Voucher Creation form will appear asking you to provide basic information and more details about the new voucher, which will be displayed in detail.

Vouchers Basic Info

In this part of the setting process, users will be asked to provide information related to the Voucher Code. The voucher label will help users categorize each voucher and make it easier to search for the vouchers through the “search vouchers” box. You can search for your vouchers by going to Settings > Financial Settings > Discount Vouchers. You’ll find the “search vouchers” box located on the “Vouchers view” page. Voucher description will be directed to both customers and fieldworkers informing them of the code’s details and the private description is directed to the office users only for a better understanding of the code usage.

Voucher Code

The voucher code will be auto-generated randomly consisting of 8 letters and numbers after clicking on +Create New Voucher located in Settings > Financial Settings > Voucher Discount

OctopusPro enables you to customize your code as the voucher code is editable so you can change it after the default one is created. This will give you huge flexibility to name the voucher code to match the code’s purpose, whether it’s related to events, holidays, special occasions …etc. This will make a significant positive impact on your brand advertisements. The selected code can contain numbers and letters, but it must be at least 8 characters.

Admin users can preview the created voucher codes in the Vouchers view page located on Settings > Financial Settings > Voucher Discount 

Admin Users will use that code to validate the voucher discount when creating a booking, the voucher field will appear in Create Booking, after adding all of the booking details and selecting a service filling the date and time of it, scrolling down to the end of the page the voucher code field will appear as follows:

Clicking on Validate will activate the voucher. Note: In this case, the voucher has a discount of $50 off the subtotal invoice amount, so when we validate it, it will reduce the Total by $50.

Voucher Label

Voucher Labels are tags or keywords that should be added while creating the voucher codes, the labels help admin users to categorize, identify and bookmark Vouchers so it can be easy to search for the vouchers, Labelling the voucher codes will improve the communication within your office, providing additional information regarding the created Voucher codes. 

Users can preview the Voucher Label in the Vouchers view page located in Settings > Financial Settings > Voucher Discount under the Label column. 

On the same page, the “Search vouchers” field can be used to look for the vouchers by Label, so when you search for Holidays Vouchers, all of the vouchers are Labeled “Holidays vouchers” will appear in the search results. 

Please note that in case of searching for a single Label keyword, all of the vouchers holding the same label keyword will appear in the search results, for example, the label is the word “Holiday” so the results will be as follows:

Description

This input field helps to provide important details describing the voucher code and is directed to the admin users, customers, fieldworkers, and any other created user role. The informative description will enhance the communication within your company, for example, you can clarify the terms and the conditions of the voucher codes for your fieldworkers to prevent any potential mistakes regarding giving the codes away. 

Also, the description is considered as your marketing message to your audience. So the entered details in the description field can be the catchy exposed content notifying them about the voucher code. 

A brief of the entered description can be viewed after saving the voucher on the Voucher view page navigating to Settings > Financial Settings > Voucher Discount

Private description

The optimum communication between the team members can’t be reached without providing the admin users the ability to connect with each other 24/7 privately. A private description is an option for admins to enter further private details about the generated voucher code only visible to admin users. So other users (field workers and customers) can’t view this field. 

When an admin creates a voucher that has a private description, all of the other admin users can check this private description by going to Settings > Financial Settings > Discount Vouchers they will view the first words of the description under Private Description. 

Voucher Amount

In this part of filling in the voucher discount form, the admin users are required to provide information about the Voucher value, the number of times the created voucher will be used, who can use the voucher code, and other restrictions related to the voucher code usage. All of the previously mentioned terms will be explained in detail as follows:

Voucher type

This field allows the admin to select how the voucher code is gonna be applied to the customers invoices. OctopusPro provides three types to select from:

  • Amount: When the voucher type is “amount” that will make code cut off a flat amount from the subtotal of the invoice. For example, if you offer your customers 50$ off through the voucher code, you need to select “Amount” as your voucher type and set the Voucher value to be 50.

  • Percent: This option means a specific percentage will be decreased from the total invoice. So if the voucher code provides 20% you will need to select “Percent” and set the Voucher value to 20.

  • Unit: Since OctopusPro makes it available to charge the customers per unit price, this type will apply the discount per the charged unit price. For example, in the cleaning industry, companies usually charge their customer per unit area, So, if a company charges the customers for a certain service for $10 per meter square, and you want the discount to cut $1 for each meter square having the price after discount to be $9 per meter square, select “Unit” as your voucher type and have the Voucher amount to be 1. 

Voucher value

Here, you are required to enter the value of the discount you want to provide to your customers. The entered figure in the voucher value field should be numeric and the least number that can be added is 1. Please note that the added number is related to the voucher type so, if the voucher type you selected above is “unit” so the entered value expresses the discount per unit, for example, if the voucher value is 5 so the discount will be $5 per unit. For the percentage voucher type, if the entered number 20 so that means the discount will be 20% off. The same goes for the “amount” voucher type, any entered number would be the actual number discounted for the customers, so if the voucher value is 30 that means the total invoice will decrease by $30. 

Voucher total redemption limit

This input field will give you control over how many times you want the voucher codes to be used in total during the duration of the code. It should be a numeric input so the voucher code can be unavailable for redeeming after exceeding that particular number. For example, If your total redemption limit is 50, That means if the code is about to be used for 51 times it won’t be redeemed.

Voucher customer redemption limit

Through this option, you can specify the maximum number of times you allow each customer to redeem the voucher code. So if you want every customer eligible for the code to use the voucher only once you can make the limit “1” and if more than once, enter the number of times you allow “3,5,..etc” 

Voucher minimum service value

One of the key options of the voucher codes that you can use, is to set a minimum value for the invoices so the voucher code can be valid to redeem. That means the total invoice shouldn’t be less than this amount to be eligible for the code. For ex, if the minimum value is $100, the total invoice with $130 will be eligible to redeem the code, the total invoice with $90 can’t benefit from the code.

Limit voucher to

In this drop down menu, you’ll find 4 options to help you to specify based on what the targeted customers can be selected to provide them the voucher codes. 

Service: If you select “service” you will limit the usage of the voucher code to certain services you provide, so any other services won’t be eligible to redeem the code. And you can add the services you want the vouchers to include in the “Services” field when “service” is chosen.

Customers: Selecting this option, allows you to add specific names of customers you want to provide them with the codes. But please note that you can only enter up to 50 names in this field. And you can add them in the field “Voucher customers” appears when “customers” is chosen.

Customers with label: If you need to make the voucher code available for certain labeled customers, you can select this option as you can add the labels you want so the customers holding the labels can redeem the codes. For Example, if you have customer labels “ VIP, Retention, old” the customers labeled with them would be eligible to redeem the code. And when it’s chosen, “Voucher customer label” field appears to enter the identified labels.

Interval types

Through the options of the Interval types, you will be able to specify the duration you will make the voucher code available so the customers can redeem it.

  • Date range: This option will let you set 2 dates so the voucher code will be eligible to redeem in between the entered dates. For example, a voucher code is available from October 10 till October 25

  • Time range: You’ll be able to select 2 times so the code will be available to redeem through that date, and that means the code will be active for redeeming every day at the same time till it’s inactive. For example, a voucher is available to redeem from 10 am to 12 am only.

If you need to disable the voucher code you can go to Settings > Financial Settings > Discount Vouchers > Disable “Active” column

  • Dates: When you select the “Dates” type you will have the ability to add specific dates you want the voucher code to be available only on these dates. This can help when you generate voucher codes for certain holidays or occasions and you will allow the customers to redeem the code only during that date.

  • Days: Just like the “dates” option, you can select particular weekdays so the voucher code will be available on them as long as the code is active. For example, a voucher code is available on Friday and Saturday only until the voucher code is inactive.

If you need to disable the voucher code you can go to Settings > Financial Settings > Discount Vouchers > Disable “Active” column

How can customers redeem voucher codes when making a booking through the customer portal?

After a customer creates a booking through the customer portal, in the final step on the booking overview page, the customers can easily enter the voucher or promo code in the empty field to redeem the offer, after clicking on validate.

Upon clicking on validate, the discount amount will be deducted from the total price of the booking. The amount deducted will depend on the type and value set for this voucher code. In this case, the amount and value set for this voucher code is 20% off the total price, which has deducted 20% off the total booking price.

Click on Remove to delete the voucher code.

Note that the voucher code will only be redeemable if the customer applying the code meets all required terms of the voucher code that has been set. For example, if the voucher is only limited to certain services, only applied services will accept the voucher code. Or, if the voucher code is limited to a city such as Sydney, the code will only be redeemable by residents of Sydney.  

The number of times the customer can redeem the voucher code will also depend on the voucher customer redemption limit set for this code. For example, if the number set is 1, the customer will be able to redeem this code only once. In case the customer tries to redeem the code more than once, the code will not be applied to this booking and a “message” will appear stating that the Redemption Ended For Customer.

How can admin users redeem voucher codes when creating a new booking through the mobile application?

Admin users can redeem discount voucher codes when creating a new booking on behalf of a customer through the mobile application. To do that: 

In the last step of creating a booking, on the bottom of the page, there will be an empty field to enter the voucher code. The admin user should enter the applicable code for this booking, then click on validate to redeem it. Note that the code will only be redeemable if it meets all required terms of the voucher code that has been set. If the code is applicable to the selected service, customer, booking location, or date.

If the code meets all the required terms, it will successfully be redeemed upon clicking on validate, and the discount amount will be deducted from the total price of the booking. The amount deducted will depend on the type and value set for this voucher code. In this case, the amount and value set for this voucher code is 20% off the total price, which has deducted 20% off the total booking price.

Click on Remove to delete the voucher code.

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