12 UX tips for user-centered promotions

Listening to customers is a value that every company aspires to, but not every company actually achieves. Understanding the opinions, complaints, and problems of your users — to better understand their needs and make sure your business is solving their problems — can deliver big benefits. One of the big issues for firms is that they have a great product, but their offering is not delivered in an accessible way.  

In this article we’ll take a look at a variety of methods that can help you develop better strategies for promotion and marketing campaigns.

Plot out what promotions you feel make sense for your business model. Work out who they’re for, why they’re going to be appealing and how you can create a return on your investment. Consider seasonal promotions for the years, and get a general idea of the type of potential you have to create value for your customers.

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Using your mission statement, company values and general roadmap, try to come up with promotions that work nicely with feature releases, partnerships, events and your targets for each quarter.

Study the type of promotions that your competition are already running. How can you separate yourself from the run-of-the-mill promotions and create some intrigue that’ll capture the hearts and minds of your customers.

Make sure you get a good understanding of what the key stakeholders in your business are looking for. The type of KPIs that your team needs to be working towards can help you decide the type of promotions that’ll work well for each situation.

If you have regular touchpoints with clients, you should be able to conduct basic research, or offer rewards for feedback and reviews that allow you to gain some insights into what your customers are interested in. In this way you can start to put together a marketing persona that will guide your promotion choices.

Get together your most creative team members from your marketing team and start using post-its (or their digital equivalent) and create coherent stories with your marketing campaigns and promotions. Gather all the ideas and then group them into must-haves, nice-to-haves, and maybes. 

Using heatmap tracking software that displays where your customers are clicking, which promotions they choose when you offer a variety and how far down the page users are scrolling can give you important insights into where to place your promotions to make them more eye-catching and which promotions work the best for your audience. 

There are a few ways to run variant tests. For example, you can create multiple exit-intent campaigns that run simultaneously, and display them to equal amounts of users to see which one is the higher converting option. Or, you can run a single campaign that offers more than one reward that your customers have to choose themselves. This way you can see quite clearly which rewards appeal to certain target groups and start to gather data about what gets your customer base excited.

Make sure you run accessibility tests with a range of your customers in various situations to check whether any physical limitations, colour blindness, or language levels will make your product and promotions difficult to use. You need to consider accessibility standards even for completely able-bodied people as well. A stressed marketing manager can have a low attention span or limited reading ability due to lack of time. Meanwhile, a parent holding their child may have to navigate your app using just one hand.   

For copy: https://hemingwayapp.com/

For colors: https://webaim.org/resources/contrastchecker/

And this Accessibility Checklist from Elsevier https://romeo.elsevier.com/accessibility_checklist/

The simplest way to create great experiences for your customers through promotions is to personalize them. Using any data attributes you collect through loyalty programs that’s tied directly to user accounts, or setting up triggers for measurable platform interaction data, you can tailor your promotions. 

Using customer segment tiers you can divide your customers by their preferences and then only display the most convincing promotions for that target segment. 

Make sure that you don’t still get your customers to type in long codes, as this is a sure-fire way for mistakes to be made, and customers to have poor online experiences. By sending your codes in a secure digital format, using push notifications that can be copied and pasted, or unlockable buttons that generate a coupon code in the moment, you can solve a big pain point.  

This is of course important for any digital experience. Your user interface has to be very intuitive for customers to use, and with very little visual noise so it doesn’t become immediately tiresome to navigate. 

Your goal for your product and your promotions should be very similar. The key is to solve a specific problem that your users or customers have. 

With your promotions you need to discover how much your customers are happy to pay so you can get a decent return on promotional campaigns, but you also have to create experiences that are rewarding and make your customers feel seen.      

For people interested in automating their promotion experiences and offering a diverse range of promotions to customers, Talon.One is for you. 

All the promotion features, backend development and scalability has already been taken care of, so all you need to do is connect your business data, automate your promotion logic and your promotions will run themselves. 

For more information on Talon.One can help you create meaningful connections with your customers, check out our Loyalty Playbook.