Today on the Winning with Shopify podcast.
An experiment where you're figuring out what What do you
need to offer in order to get the number of purchases you
want? So my my brain is fried from
trying to work out how to actually get on this recording.
Me, I'm like, OK, that that's probably a good starting point.
Put it on Google ads, get rid of it, break even like it's just
sitting in the. Warehouse really motivates
people to buy a little more. I almost don't care what GA 4
tells me or what the ad platforms and tracking
companies. Tell me they could actually be
like getting a nice hefty bump in revenue by just setting up
these simple discounts. The text there, you're just not
utilizing it. Yet they have as like a mission
to rein in how much they're discounting.
Hello and welcome to another episode of Winning with Shopify
podcast. I'm currently recording on my
colleagues laptop. So if anything goes wrong or
weird apologies. I've left my laptop at previous
meeting which was over 2 hours away and I've had to obviously
stop texting the client to work out how to get this laptop back
to to my office. But I'm sitting in the podcast,
you know for the next couple of hours recording a few episodes.
So apologies if anything goes wrong, blame Rob in my team for
being so kind to lend me his laptop.
I don't know what Rob's going to do for the next two hours, but
if you need Rob over that time or you have needed him and he's
not replied, apologies, my fault.
Anyway, I'm super excited for today's episode.
We are talking about not just e-mail, but we're talking about
something else to do with e-mail from one of our partners, which
I'll come onto in a moment. If you haven't already, make
sure you go to wwspodcast.com and sign up to our e-mail list.
As we're talking about e-mail today, the guys at Saguna help
us run e-mail and they keep kicking me.
Brian especially. He's been on the show several
times. Brian keeps kicking me to be
like Nick. Tell people to go sign up.
There's so many cool offers coming out.
We're running some extra content that we don't put on the podcast
past, and we've got something very exciting happening next
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Obviously you're not going to miss the whole of summer.
I don't know what the date is yet, but something exciting is
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work out logistics of how we're going to make it all happen.
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of cool content and it means you never miss an episode, whether
it's a Tuesday tea break, talks with yours truly, or it is a
Friday episode like today, where we're going to be talking to a
very special guest. And without further ado, my very
special guest is Cara from Saguino Sakara, Welcome to the
show. How are you?
Good. So excited to be here.
Thanks for having me. Well, it's lovely to have you
here. We still haven't met anyone from
Saguno that is not full of energy.
It's super knowledgeable and super fun to have on the show.
So I'm so excited to have you and as I said to you on e-mail
just before we started recording, so organised as well.
I have so many notes to talk about, so many things to try and
cover if someone's like Nick, you've mentioned Saguno five
times, what on earth is that? I'm so lost here.
You've mentioned e-mail and Saguno Cara.
Tell us a bit about what Saguno is and also your role in the
team there. Yeah, Yeah.
So we're, we're a software company and our mission is to
build better marketing tools for Shopify merchants.
And so usually when you talk about Seguno, you're talking
about Seguno e-mail, which is an e-mail marketing platform for
Shopify brands built inside Shopify.
And today we're going to be focusing on a different aspect
of Seguno, which is also available with an e-mail
actually, but it's discounts. And So what I work on is our app
Bulk Discount Code Bot and it's an app for generating unique
discount codes within Shopify for running your discounts.
Amazing. And we're going to talk a lot
about discounts as we go through.
And as you say, we normally talk about what we're saying.
We're talking to Saguna. We normally talk about e-mail
and it's very often Brian or someone like Brian and the team
talking about e-mail strategies. So with discounts, obviously
Shopify, if they own their own discount area and you can just
go and set up a discount and and run something.
Tell us what why that doesn't work?
Why you guys have set out to create something different?
So for for bulk discount code bot specifically, what we focus
on is unique discount codes. And often people get confused as
to what that is. So it's not when you see like
Spring 10 or Winter 15 and it's the same code that's like static
for everybody. It's when actually each person
gets their own random string, their own discount code.
And so these are really great because they give you super
accurate last touch attribution, they let you experiment with
different offers without compromising your brand
perception. And the personalization tends to
also help with driving loyalty and in life cycle marketing.
So I love unique discount codes. I'm excited to get into how
people use them and how merchants who are listening to
the show can try using them too. I think one of the biggest
issues of not having a unique code especially is, I mean,
first, there's a whole personalization side of it.
So if it was Nick 123 from a brand, I would say this is
really nice. That brand has given me a
discount that I can use. And secondly, the first thing
I've written down is how many times have we gone to the car on
a website and then just Googled like discount code, voucher
codes or anything sort of similar.
And you just find, as you say, like the summer 2025 or the
welcome 10 to get 10% off your, your first order, which kind of
makes it feel like, right. I'm just part of a big set of
fish swimming in the river at the moment.
This isn't anything unique any, anything personalized, but
obviously unique gives you way more control, doesn't it?
Say, tell us some of the advantages as to using some more
of the advantages beyond the obvious as to using those unique
codes or some of the scenarios where people actually use these.
Yeah. So something that's been really
cool to see is when people are using unique discount codes,
they're typically not just thinking about like, oh, I'm
going to run this discount or whatever the just like these are
the standard discounts. Instead, they're thinking about
like, what are these experiments I can run offering different
targeted discounts to different segments such that I can drive
more revenue. And well, I'm sure we'll get
into it. We recently have been working on
this discount report that analyzed 162,000 discounts from
12,000 brands. And something that we see is
larger brands in particular are really strategic about how
they're doing their discount codes.
And so we're excited to bring that to everybody because there
are some low hanging fruit that we think everybody should be
doing. And how much does it vary across
different customer groups for like obviously when we talk
about e-mail a lot with you guys, we talk about
segmentation. So how much does it vary between
somebody that buys 10 * a year? Do you try not to discount too
much because actually they value the product and are buying it
anyway, so why discounts it? Or do you try and give them a
discount to try and encourage them to do more?
Is that segmentation really important actually for
discounting as much as it is for more traditional things like
e-mail? Absolutely, Absolutely.
Yeah. And I think, and there are all
sorts of different kinds of discounts.
So there's a discount for someone who's new and coming in,
they're new to your brand. It's very common to be like a
welcome offer. And when that's on a unique code
instead of a static 1, you really make sure that you're
going to capture their e-mail or their phone number, ideally
both, right. And then there's a whole bunch
of other discounts like as part of marketing life cycle.
So right after you make a purchase, you're likely to want
to come back and purchase more. So what kind of discount should
you be offering there? So yeah, they're not I I feel
like I calling it a discount makes it sound a little bit
lame. It's really just this powerful
tool for driving growth. And when people, something I
love talking to our customers is you see that they are like just
so thoughtful and, and like there's so much analysis going
into what they're offering and then analysis after the fact of
what works, what didn't and tweaking things.
And it's it's really fun and it has a big impact.
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I think as well, when you've just got a blanket code, it's
like I mentioned about people sharing it, It's so easy for
them just to share that summer 10 and go 10% off summer and
everyone's like, great, let's jump on that.
But actually, if you use unique codes, you could say, right,
just a, a random third of my audience, I'm going to 10%, a
random 3rd, I'm going to 15% and a random 3rd I'm going to 17 1/2
percent, 20s too much. Go 17 1/2 and see actually the
17 1/2, the average order value was so much higher.
People buying 4 products instead of two and two on the other two
segments, that is an incredible learning.
Which as we say, even if you run, for example, if you run
just three codes, so you had like 10% off, 15% off, 17% off.
If you run those, you just need the 17 1/2% to be shared once
and the whole whole test is ruined.
And the 10 and 15%, anyone that finds the 17 1/2 would go, I've
been ripped off here. Whereas actually if someone did
see the 10% and we're getting 17 1/2, which was a unique code,
they'd say I'm a valued customer.
But also it's a one time use, so I'm not going to share it.
And it must be, I imagine again, I'm kind of looking at it from a
customer acquisition point of view and and as an outsider
compared to you who's in the detail.
But it must be. It must be so important to put
that unique one time use as well alongside the code.
Yes, yeah, exactly. And I have two things on that.
I love how you described it. It's very much an experiment
where you're figuring out what do you need to offer in order to
get the number of purchases you want and what can you save as
revenue for your brand, right. And one thing that's really cool
with unique codes is like, if you imagine that it's part of
like an e-mail or SMS marketing life cycle, e-mail you don't
need to have, you basically can have your code expire whenever
you want it to expire for that person.
So you can set the expiry to be one week later.
And that drives urgency. So instead of that static code
that may be sitting there forever, right?
You're like, this really is going to expire in seven days.
And just to touch on just for fun, because of that idea of
like 1517.520, whatever, something we found is the most
popular. What do you think the most
popular percentage off is that we see?
I imagine it's probably 1010%. It's a good guess.
It's actually 20% is it? And then 10 is number 2 and 15
is number 3. So to me, I get it.
To me, it's definitely going to like vary by brand.
But when you look at the one that's the most popular to
offer, you know that brand, like other brands are also putting
thought into those offers and looking at how they're
performing. So to me, I'm like, OK, that
that's probably a good starting point.
OK, I've got about 20 things Cara to go out on this.
I I've said the last few weeks as well.
This is my favorite part of every episode where it's like,
OK, my notepad is getting full and it's like we can go down so
many roads. I want to just, I want to start
with two that I think are much quicker.
And then let's dive into something you've just mentioned.
I think I think it's really key actually, one of the quick ones
then is this report. Do people have access to it?
I don't actually know the answer to this.
I know we went close to you guys.
Is this somewhere people can go and access it and download the
report? Yes, definitely.
So we'll, we'll put the link in the description and yeah, it's,
it's available to download for everybody.
Sorry, I did know that before we hit record, that's the link we'd
sorry my brain is fried from trying to work out how to
actually get on this recording with my laptop issues, but yeah,
sorry. So yeah, the link will be in the
description guys. That's the link that we had a
conversation. About.
Sorry, my bad. So the report is available,
which thinks really, really powerful with so to ask.
Sorry, I said there were two easy ones and 1 not so easy.
That's answered both my easy ones and actually there's 2 not
so easy. And let's go into some of the
deeper things in this. So with unique codes, if you had
say 50,000 customers or or half a million customers or 2 million
customers, whatever the amount, there's a lot of data there and
there's a lot of people to try and get unique codes too.
So even if somebody used an app that could create unique codes
in Shopify's discount code area, for example, and populate them,
there's still an enormous headache forthcoming, which is
how are we going to send out emails to each of those
customers with those codes? And I take it given that you
guys are Ciguno and you your main services e-mail and then
you've got Canvon and these discount codes and other bits
and pieces that kind of fit around, take it, it's all
integrated in Saguna, isn't it? So you can go right, I'm going
to run a campaign and insert their unique code here,
segmentation of only people that we've given codes to, etcetera,
etcetera. Yep.
So that, so the base functionality of just generating
codes, it actually is built directly into Saguna e-mail like
you said. So you can just say you want
unique codes and it's going to automatically put those into
your emails. There's yeah, some additional
things like reporting and we're working on on deepening that
further. And so that's, that's only in
both discount code bot for now. But you do touch on something
really interesting, which is how do you get, OK, you just
generated 1,000,000 codes now how do you get them where you
want them to go? And so the way of doing that
from our app is you just export them to CSV and then pretty much
all whether you're doing SMS, direct mail, another e-mail
provider, you can just upload them that way.
So try to make that easy but. Amazing.
Otherwise poor little bobs going to have a very, very long day
clicking send on a million emails to get those codes out.
But the I guess the other part of this as well that you touched
on, and this probably flows a bit more into what we normally
talk about, but not specifically around discount codes, but we
talk a lot about automation with you guys and actually setting up
some of the flows. So if this, then that, if this,
then that and you kind of end up with the sequence.
Like for example, I love the I mentioned this so many times in
the show and loads of our clients.
In fact, every single client that's using Saguna uses this
now is when you send an e-mail, you can click a box box to say,
if they don't open the e-mail, send it again with a different
subject line. That's one very, very quick and
simple example, but with the discount codes, you can set so
many different automations, which one of the biggest
headaches we found when we've done surveys across lots of you
guys, lots of Shopify merchants and e-commerce brands, one of
the biggest headaches you guys have is coming up with social
content and most importantly, coming up with e-mail content.
So actually, if you're like, I'm going to block out three weeks
of this month to go week one, I'm going to send out a discount
code to everybody and I'm going to spend the rest of the weeks
going, hey, you didn't open your e-mail or you did open your
e-mail, but you haven't used it yet.
Or you did open it, you've put it in the cart, but you haven't
checked out yet. There's all these different
stories that are very specific that although it's automated and
no one's physically writing the e-mail, click and send.
The power of that. I mean, making that a
conversation. We're trying to give you a nice
thing customer come back and buy.
That saves part of that headache of what am I going to e-mail,
doesn't it? Oh yeah, definitely.
And having, if you're, because today is a lot about discounts.
If you have a discount code in your e-mail, then you want to
resend that discount code in future emails using the same
unique discount code. And that yeah, that definitely
helps you figure out what content should be going in
there. How do you keep adding value to
your customers as you're like re emailing them and and sharing
information? Yeah, amazing, amazing.
And what are some of the other use cases that people would use
the automation with discount codes for that you see, I mean
having, I mean you poor thing, having looked at 12,000 brands
and there's 162, I've got written down 100 from your
e-mail, 162,000 discount sets. What are some of the other use
cases specifically? If we specifically ran to
automation for a second, what are some of the other use cases
brands using this kind of setup for?
Yeah. So the the most popular ones
with marketing life cycle are new subscriber welcome.
So that could be e-mail, SMS, an app wherever you're welcoming
them. So offering a unique discount
code for that. The second most popular one is
win back. So a customer has churned and
you're offering them a discount code to get them back.
And those are the 2 ones that come up the most.
After that, we see post purchase, which I had mentioned
earlier, I think that's an underused 1.
And we also see browse and card abandonment, which I think you
touched on in the automations. But yeah, the two most popular
ones are those welcome ones and the win back.
I think one of the biggest things that I'm, I'm as a
consumer, I'm seeing brands do more of and as an agency, I'm
seeing brands set up in their back end is, is that post
purchase? And one of the metrics, one of
the KPIs or benchmarks that a lot of brands that we work with
that we actually set is to say that, you know, what's your
average order value? And then how, what's your
average cost to acquire a customer through Google ads,
Meta ads or through all marketing for all new customers
every month? What's that figure to say?
The average order value is $100 and it costs US $25 to acquire a
a new customer in which is going up.
Unfortunately everybody with inflation and click costs and
everything else going going up. But let's assume it was $25.00,
but $100, the average order value, well, you've got up to a
25% discount you could give and that would then be benchmarked
the same cut for somebody 2nd order and that would be the same
cost as you acquiring them from Google.
So actually, if you gave away anything less than that profit
and it's profit compared to customer decision.
I guess the hardest thing brands need to really think about and
certainly have to balance with all of this it when it comes to
the financials as you've got to balance what is, what is the
customer actually? What are they going to do
without us giving them a discount?
Because we don't want to just give discounts away and find
actually our repeat order rate goes up 5%, but we've discounted
all our orders. And we're, or maybe we're losing
10% revenue, but we've gained 5 from this and we've lost 10%
because everybody's now getting discounts, which I think is
where the unique codes are even more powerful, aren't they?
Yeah, yeah, definitely. Because you, you only give
discounts to the folks you want to give discounts to, right,
Very specifically, you also don't have an issue that I hear
all the time from brands who are now moving towards more unique
codes is that they've had these just like splash discounts on
their landing page for a while. And now people don't want to buy
unless if they see one of those on their landing page.
So it's really devaluing the brand.
Yeah, although this is a little bit winding.
I wanted to. I love how you were getting into
average order value and just like how are you driving that
up? And one of the things that was
one of my favorite findings in this report and something we've
heard from our customers is that there are ways to use discounts
to drive average order value up. And so the most common ways are
with buy X, get Y discount with large brands actually use six
times more often than small brands.
So let's let's use them everybody.
That's fascinating. Sorry, large corporate brand.
Well, not corporate necessarily, just large brands.
They're six times more likely to use if you buy this then you get
this discount than small brands. Yep.
And it, it just is driving your average order value up, right
because you're setting requirements for what you need
to buy in order to get something.
And a very similar one is gift with purchase.
And something we hear from especially larger brands who
have experimented with all different kinds of discounts is
that gift with purchase or buy X, get Y.
The secret is you actually just have some excess inventory
that's not moving. And what you do is you say, hey,
if you spend a bit more than you would have otherwise, I'm going
to give you this excess inventory.
And that really motivates people to buy a little more.
And at the same time, it's just a win win because you're getting
rid of your excess inventory, you're not devaluing your brand,
and people are excited to get that inventory for free.
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So that's tax cloud.com/winning. So we had a brand that had some
excess stock and we, they, they said to us, can you just put it
on Google ads, get rid of it, break even like it's just
sitting in the warehouse. And I sort of phoned, how much
of this stuff have you got? And they said, oh, it's about
20% of our entire stock right now.
Is this wasted stuff over here? And it's only got 6 month shelf
life left until it's out of date and has to go in the bin.
And I sort of said, all right, I've got an idea Rather than
saying this was, you know, this is cheap and it's on our outlet,
take it off for the first week just because we've got a few
months. We've got six months to, well,
we've got probably two or three months to sell it for a week.
Just take it off the site all together.
We're going to launch it as the new luxury range because it was
actually better and it it'd cost them more and they'd written it
off because they said, so new luxury range.
We put a, we put a free sample of it in everybody's order and
said, this is the new luxury version of what you've ordered.
And because it was, it was to do with health supplements, we and,
and protein shakes and stuff like that.
So we said that this this new supplement and actually had a
higher protein and a creatine content, I think it was than all
their other normal products. And but they they couldn't sell
it. They were just discounting,
discounting, discounting to the point where they were giving
people basically money with it. When you looked at how much the
what the price was compared to what they paid for it.
We put it in the new luxury range bestseller.
It was a bestseller and they couldn't get any more of it
because they had screwed up the relationship with the supplier
because they'd gone, nobody's buying this stuff.
I just showed the positioning was so important.
And actually we put the price of it up at the same time.
So we gave it away for free, but we used a similar discount thing
of saying, if you spend £100 on the website, you get one of our
new premium. Like this is our highest
protein, highest creatine supplement that you can put in
your protein shakes. And people were like, wow, let's
try that. And just the psychology of it,
knowing it's, I've just had this thing that's really expensive
and it's free. And about 3040% of all customers
started then buying that. And suddenly the finance
director was like, what have you done?
You've like hacked the system. It's like, no, no, it's
psychological marketing. We're using the human psychology
to, to go, how do we make this a premium product because you're
offering it too cheap. So sorry, just, I know I'm a bit
of a tangible, I love that, I love that association.
But going back to, I'm so surprised that big brands use
that more than small brands. I'm so I'm surprised and the
reason I'm surprised is for a big brand to get approval on
something like that, it's gone through several chains of
commands and it's it's a bigger risk if it goes wrong.
For small brands, you could run it for two days and this is the
way you turn it off. It's so much more nimble.
So I think what other learnings are in this report?
That's amazing. Yeah, Yeah, I think that's so
cool. By the way, I just the reframing
giving the sample now it's premium and all that
experimentation. We see folks doing things like
that all the time and it makes all the difference and not not
writing things off, right. But yeah, so buy X, get Y, get
with purchase. That kind of ties into just a
larger trend. It's a great point that it is
more effort for larger brands to do these offers.
But at the same time, they recognize that strategic
discounts Dr. revenue. And so they have like allocated
resources to think through what are the discounts we should be
offering and track how they're performing.
And sometimes with smaller brands, they just kind of like
have so much going on, so much on their plate.
And so they kind of like overlooked that they could
actually be like getting a nice hefty bump in revenue by just
setting up these simple discounts.
So I really love that. 1-2 other use cases that were pretty
interesting. One is affiliate programs that
accounted for 15% of 1/5/15 of all of the discounts that we
were looking at. And that was that was really
cool. And another one that's
especially popular in Europe is student and friends discounts,
which was just behind it at 11%. So yeah, happy to get into some
more there. Yeah.
Definitely, I mean we talk about affiliates quite a bit.
So let's let's cover that if we've got time in a minute.
But I think the I mean, you've got obviously got uni day and
student beans here as well. I love to call it student beans.
It's so funny. But yeah, student and friends,
those discount codes, I guess with the unique element to it as
well, having some verification of like you have to
useyour.ac.uk e-mail address if you're in the UK
orsoyouknow.edu, I think it is. That's used a lot in the US.
It's what Apple used to do with the student discount on Apple.
And tell us more about how that can work and how you can make
that customer feel special. Like special and unique enough
that it's more effective than just using one of those blanket
codes we spoke about at the start.
Yeah. So I that's a great question.
So I think the yeah, I don't have a great answer to that
honestly. I think that that's a great
question. I think that to me, what's
what's so exciting about student discounts and why at first I was
kind of surprised to see those so high up.
And then I was thinking about it more and I was like, oh, it's
really interesting. And, and I have seen folks talk
about it is that often people say, oh, students, right.
We're going to offer, let's say, a 15 percent, 20% discount,
something like that. And that's going to dig into our
margins and we're not going to focus on it.
But when you look at these sites like unit days and student
beans, you're actually distributing like that's, that's
a top of funnel way to get, get in front of more people.
And people often find that the discount that they offer to
students isn't digging into margins sufficiently to be an
issue for them. And it's still definitely a win
win. So I just thought it was
interesting that student discounts are so important to
especially larger brands, especially in Europe.
And we did actually in our analysis group it with friends
and family discounts and employee discounts.
So kind of all of these together, we're calling insider
discounts and people are doing them way more than I thought.
So really interesting. Yeah.
I do. Whenever we show any data to
clients, I love sort of saying to them initially like everyone
write down what you think these next 20 stats are.
Just write them down quickly. Like I just want to get an idea
as to what we all think and I'll do the same.
Like, well, I can tell you what I thought 1st and then here's
the data to tell you what's actually going on.
One thing I was just thinking though, which I think is it's
both an issue, but there's a amazing solution using unique
discount codes for and we've, we've only done this once, I
think, and now I'm thinking about we should do this more.
One of the issues we're having at the moment is to do with
cookie banners, GA 4 tracking all the kind of nonsense going
on in governments and politics in certainly around Europe at
the moment. You guys seem completely immune
in the US, you lucky, lucky people.
And but we've got a couple of new laws changing in the UK to
basically kill cookie banners and stuff and get rid of them,
which I'm going to talk about a lot, One on the show over the
next few months, guys, January 26th is when it actually comes
into effect. And the EU are furious, which
makes me very happy say there the, the thing that's happening
is we've got all this traffic coming in from Google ads, from
Meta, from e-mail, from SEO, But because of cookie issues,
privacy, people accepting, rejecting banners, we're just,
we're just losing data. And it's, it's, I would almost
say this year is a bit of an epidemic of data loss for
companies, which in 2025 sounds so mad.
We've got AI, we've got more digitalisation than ever and we
can't track stuff. We got clients that have
launched apps recently and we can't track very well people
that have gone from website into the app stores or Google Play
store and then downloaded the app.
So actually using a unique code, you could run a campaign for
students only. So you can run it on Google met
to say, if you're, if we know you're a student, see these ads,
I'm going to target these ads saying, Hey, come buy a product
using a unique codes. We could also connect those
unique codes to say, there's no way you could have found the
landing page and therefore got hold of a unique code unless you
came through this campaign. So I, I, I've been doing a lot,
sending some of our B to B clients, almost saying, let's
just build a second version of the site.
You can only access if you clicked on an advert.
And if you clicked on the ad, you're in that version of the
site. And if you've not clicked on an
ad, you're on the normal public site.
And then I almost don't care what GA 4 tells me or what the
ad platforms and tracking problems tell me.
I'm going to look at the CRM system and say, all of these
guys filled out a PPC or an advertising tagged form.
They're all from ads, any questions and that's kind of it
kind of splits everything to say like this is all of our
activities. So using unique codes and
Shopify do exactly the same thing.
Exactly. Yeah, that's really that's,
that's a smart approach. And and it's to me we're just
losing the ability to attribute where sales are coming from.
And so with unique discount codes, you're able to know
exactly what that last touch was and do it in a way cuz yeah, the
privacy laws, they have a reason for being right.
It's really, yeah, they do privacy, they do, they do.
And so the unique discount codes are giving you that attribution
in a way that is really privacy friendly too.
So that's a benefit there. Absolutely.
And I mean, I'm just just looking at the time.
Let's talk about affiliates for a second then.
So that could be anything from an influencer to a blog to a
discount site. It could be sites where you can
apply for a discount code, that kind of thing.
Tell us what you found in the report about that, because 15%,
I mean that again is quite a high statistic compared to what
I see in GA 4. Yeah.
And so, so when we look at the affiliate programs, the biggest
thing again is attribution. So especially if you think about
I'm working with this influencer, that influencer,
this retail store, what what is actually working right.
And so one of the most frustrating things as a merchant
is to be like offering discounts and then you don't know what
what worked and you don't know what next steps to take.
And so we really see, of course, affiliate use cases are rising
and the use of unique codes to track attribution is really
important. And one of the things I thought
was especially interesting looking at the affiliate use
case is it's not just those ones that you mentioned.
It's also some like especially in talking to larger brands,
it's some additional ways that people are using affiliate
programs that you may not expect.
So one example is one of our larger brands that sells
hardware is selling it through retail hardware stores and
they'll give an affiliate code to all employees because they
find that for each purchase made by an employee, they get about 7
more than they would have otherwise in the store.
And so that's. Fascinating.
It makes sense, but that is really interesting, yeah.
And they'll even, they'll offer a pretty steep discount to the
employee such that hopefully their margin is still there, but
they're taking into account those seven more purchases.
So really cool. I mean, it makes a lot of sense.
I mean, I bought a new car recently and I said to the guy
when I was buying it, have you ever driven one of these cars
I'm looking to buy? And he said, yeah, it was my
demo car for about 6 weeks. So I know how the engine works
system and how comfortable it is and all this kind of stuff.
And he said, and he sort of said these two things you don't
really need and actually had a much more having asked him that
question had a much more honest experience.
But equally, if I, if his answer had been no, I've never used it,
which is that I would say a majority of you guys doing
wholesale that are listening at home, like probably, probably,
probably not, not not even thinking about this kind of
thing. But I, I guess the other way
they could almost do it is if you were using a retailer,
rather than just using the discount code, you could even
just say to them, look, you've ordered a hundred of these.
We're sending you 103. Three are for you and your
staff. So enjoy, you know, and get to
use them and start and people do all the time.
I haven't got any hearing. I have got one and I've spoken
about them so much. The bean shop, Lorna, I know you
listen to the podcast a lot and you love it.
And I've got one of their T-shirts up just literally over
there at the moment and we drink their coffee.
And although it probably hasn't cost you much at all, owner, I'm
hoping you're getting more sales because I'm talking about it on
the show so much. But I think that again, it's
just that that use case I think of using what actually came from
a unique discount code has suddenly led to so many things.
How, how many brands do you find have access to the unique
discount code system and just aren't utilising it well enough
yet? How many people do you have,
many situations do you guys find where it's like the text there,
you're just not utilising it yet?
So one thing we see I guess that the data that we looked at are
all people who have access to unique discount codes.
So we are looking specifically at both discount code bot, but
anyone in in secret new e-mail would also have the access.
And the main thing we're so everyone there by definition has
like done something. But what we see is that the
larger brands are doing a lot more.
And so where smaller brands may focus more on just like the
typical seasonal promotions, you have the larger brands
dedicating more resources, some small brands need to, but larger
brands are dedicating more resources to these marketing
life cycle campaigns, the affiliate programs, the student
discounts. And they're really not that much
effort to set up relatively once you kind of have on your radar
like, oh, that that could drive some serious revenue for me.
So yeah, hopefully, hopefully folks who listen to this and and
don't have any discount codes and strategic discount offerings
yet will have a couple things they could go apply and make
some more money. Absolutely.
And one of the last, one of the only, sorry, I say last, there's
probably going to be more. One of the only notes I've got
on my pad in front of me that we haven't spoken about.
And I wrote it down right at the start as well.
It's just about the ability to use the unique discount code to
avoid devaluing the brand. And we, I kind of mentioned it
and I know you've mentioned it a couple of times as well.
So mention it a little bit about how when someone basically when
you get a blanket discount code, it's like, right, these guys are
10% off. Or you mentioned the homepage
banner. If I forget a welcome 10
discount, I'm expecting 10% off every time.
Or we've all got more than one e-mail address.
I'm just gonna use one e-mail address.
And then you've got, you think you've got a million customers,
you've actually only got 400,000 because loads have used multiple
emails over the years. But that ability to not devalue
the brand is so powerful, isn't it?
To say, because for example, if you did a, and you mentioned
this earlier, if we did a abandoned basket automation, so
you've got an abandoned basket, but the basket value was above a
certain amount. You could say, hey, here's a 10%
of code that expires at midnight.
And suddenly it's like, hey, let me run home, honey, we need to
talk like I've been offered this 10% off.
It's quite a big order, especially for a hardware store.
Like there's loads of stuff I need to buy.
Or if it's say it's somebody buying screws and shelves and
wood and stuff because they're a tradie and they need to do a
job, they might be phoning the customer going, hey, the guys
have offered me 10% off on your order, but we've got to, we've
got to do it tonight. And it creates a bit of urgency
then. And again, you can then see that
that's starting to roll out. But what you're not doing,
you're not actually applying a homepage banner, you're not
applying a discount to products. Therefore, the mindset is it's
full price, but they've offered me a little discount here, but
you've only offered it to that one person because they've got a
high average order value, etcetera, etcetera.
So I think it's a good way of keeping it locked, isn't it?
Exactly, exactly. And one thing, yeah, that I find
really interesting is a lot of larger brands who have done a
lot of just banners on their site, they have as like a a
mission to rein in how much they're discounting because
they're worried about how much, how much that's impacting what
they can charge for their products.
But even when they rein it in, they're able to use unique
discount codes basically in place of those site wide banners
to keep and rebuild positive premium brand associations while
driving that urgency. And the reason you're
discounting is to drive more revenue, right?
It, it works to drive more revenue as long as people aren't
like, oh, where's that 60%? No.
So, so really reclaiming that as a tool that you can use without
having the fear that there are going to be consequences down
the road of how you're you're devaluing your brand perception.
Absolutely. And and just to jump back to
that, that excess stock one as well-being able to e-mail
someone and say, you know, you've especially win.
I, I let you guys, you guys call them win back campaigns.
And I love that as a phrase because it explains so clearly
what it is and having that win back campaign to basically say
something you've not bought from us for six months, got on this
excess stock. So next time you spend $50 on
our website, we're going to give you a, we owe you a free gift.
Like, you know, it's this, there's something on us to go
and spend $50 and find out what it is.
You just get rid of excess stock.
Or like in my client situation, trying to make a very cheap
product, more premium because it was very expensive to bring it
in the first place, But amazing. Is there anything else on your
list? We've got a couple of minutes
still, but anything else on your list from the report that you
think is particularly awesome that we should point out before
people go and download it and read it for themselves?
I think that was the the main highlights I wanted to share.
Yeah, something some, when you take a look at the report,
you'll see we're not going to get into it here, but there's,
there's nitty gritty broken down by industry and also by region.
And so while the trends that I talked about generally apply
across regions and across industries, you'll see that
there are some exceptions. And so I definitely, yeah, take
a look at those breakdowns there.
But yeah, my, my hope is that a take away is that brands now
have on top of mind a little more that like discounts are
this really powerful tool for driving revenue.
And if you use unique discount codes in the way that especially
these large brands are doing it, you're going to make more money
and do so in a way that that's not devaluing your brand.
So amazing. Yeah, Hope, hope, hope to see
see more folks using it and growing their businesses that
way. Amazing.
And I love that as a as a closing statement as well,
because I think the, the challenge people always have
with discounting is it's going to start devaluing stuff.
But as we, as we've said today, guys, it doesn't have to devalue
what you're doing can make things way more targeted and
also give you a bit more control over when, when and who and how
you discount as well, which is really, really powerful.
So Cara, the link's going to be in the description below if
anyone wants to reach out and ask you guys any questions or
they're like, all right, I've heard enough about Saguna.
I'm going to use it. Let's use it.
And how can people find Saguna apps?
How can they get in touch with you guys?
How can they ask questions and how can they book that free
session with you guys as well if they are interested in getting
in touch? So you can go to our website,
saguno.com and we'll put a bunch of links in there too.
I'm happy to include my e-mail and other two mates emails as
well if you think that's good. Yeah, of course.
But definitely, yeah, you can. My e-mail is cara@sagunocara.com
and I'd love to hear from you, especially if you have any
feedback from the conversation. And yeah, yeah, this was really
fun. Amazing.
And if any of you guys are already on our e-mail list as
well and you want to talk to Cara or Brian or any of the team
about using Saguno. I think in the last two months,
I think it's about 7:00 or eight people that have emailed us
saying some of our clients, some, some people come through
BS 7 or 8 brands and are using Saguno.
And honestly, looking back going, why do not do this before
I have an actual human to work with.
Brian is very busy at the moment, but he can always be
busier and he's doing an amazing job.
So thank you, Brian, if you're listening to this as well,
massive thank you for joining in today's show, Cara, and also
thank you for the report. I, I cannot wait to have a bit
of a deeper read as well. It wasn't quite out at the time
we've recorded now. So I'm going on all the things
Cara has pulled out in an e-mail to me, but I'm looking forward
to having a, having a deep dive into it and might actually
feature in some other episodes as well coming forward in the
next few weeks as well, guys. So Cara, massive thank you to
you. Thank you so much for joining
us. Thanks.
Amazing. And for everyone listening at
home, leave us a review on whatever platform you're
listening on. Hit subscribe button if you
haven't already. This is a Friday and it's the
end of the week. Congratulations, you've made it
on Tuesday. I will be doing a Tuesday tea
break talks as well, which is just me to watch Shopify news
and bits and pieces going on and any news from Saguna as well and
other partners and sponsors will be featuring on that.
Otherwise, we're back again next Friday with another guest.
Thanks for tuning in and we hope to have you again with us in the
future. Hey guys, I just want to take a
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