The Value of Secure Promotions: Single-Use Voucher Codes for Exclusive Offers

The rundown

Pricing competition is fierce for TV, broadband and mobile service providers. To attract new customers, BT wanted to build exclusive offers for affiliate marketing networks, without cannibalising sales in other marketing channels. Partners like Groupon, Wowcher and Living Social are always supportive of running short-term campaigns with deals for their users with a 50% discount or more. Discounting online products creates a mass-leakage challenge for BT because offers can be shared virally - with no control.

Using Uniqodo, BT launched a set of exclusive propositions, in conjunction with Awin, for these new affiliate partners. Serving secure, single-use codes ensures each offer remains exclusive to that affiliate's user base and protects against revenue losses. The initial two-week test campaign with Groupon resulted in 2,500 sales and has led to subsequent successful campaigns.

The challenge of creating secure promotions

BT was looking for new ways to deliver its marketing strategy and reach a significant number of potential new TV and broadband customers.

Working with Awin’s affiliate marketing team, BT has successfully offered cash-back deals for new customer acquisition but technically could not run voucher code promotions. BT knew that generic, multi-use discount codes would cannibalise direct sales and cause significant attribution issues on their systems once shared.

To develop exclusive offers for partners like Groupon or Living Social and other voucher code partners, securing codes and content is imperative to ensure only the affiliate's audience can benefit.

The solution was to develop a content gate with single-use discount codes

Awin, who knew of Uniqodo’s expertise in delivering secure voucher codes, contacted David and Chris to design and propose a solution for BT.

Within two weeks of development, Uniqodo built a bespoke system, integrating with BT.com to serve their affiliates’ needs and fulfil exclusive offers through a content gate.

This makes each offer only accessible with a single-use voucher code, to prevent open sharing. Before going live, Uniqodo ran thorough tests to ensure the overlay page and secure codes all worked as expected.

Uniqodo: Flexible, easy to implement, solutions galore.

“The relationship with Uniqodo works really well, for example, they are further developing the creative for our system in conjunction with our team. I’d highly recommend Uniqodo to advertisers who want to lock down their exclusive offers and protect them with secure voucher codes. It’s important to develop attractive deals for our affiliates, however, for certain campaigns, we want to develop a much richer offer which can be tracked and controlled via single-use codes; Uniqodo provides a perfect solution for us."

Cai Mullins, Affiliate Sales Manager, BT

BT gained exciting new partnerships and 2,500 immediate sales

BT's first exclusive Groupon deal offered half-price BT Sport for Sky TV Subscribers, which resulted in 2,500 sales within two and a half weeks of launch.

Uniqodo enabled BT to design and set up exclusive new offers quickly, engage new partners and promote other products.

Their new affiliate partners can access any number of secure codes and the functionality allows BT to extend or limit customer numbers, or control the total sales value of the promotion.

BT is trialling local offers in specific regions for BT Broadband and Mobile products. They are also working with new partners, Wowcher, Living Social and vouchercodes.co.uk to test and understand their users’ appetite for BT offers.

BT can react faster to their partners' needs because they have the ability to develop new campaigns or switch them on and off within a few days.