Discover How EE Slashed 95% of Admin Overhead with a Smarter Perk Program

EE's Objectives

• EE wanted to expand its affiliate channel activity for mobile contracts and launch a new employee benefits scheme - EE Perk.
• The scheme would work like this: Business clients whose staff register for EE Perk receive a 20% discount which they can then pass on to five friends or family members; EE employees are eligible for the same offer.
• With their prior experiences demonstrating the challenges of generic, multi-use codes EE wanted to guarantee the removal of any opportunities for leakage or promotion abuse. Read more on the challenges of this case below.

Challenges to Overcome

EE Performance Marketing Manager, Sachin Thanki, manages EE's affiliate offers with current partners while sourcing new partners.

He explained to us, “Customers want the cheapest contracts with the highest amount of data, so the market for mobile communications is extremely competitive and price-driven. Yet we need to create digital offers which align with our positioning as a premium brand."

For some context, before EE re-branded in 2013, there was Orange Perk - an equivalent proposition which offered a discount for paying monthly contracts via generic, multi-use codes.

Unfortunately, this promotion was frequently abused because the codes would be shared publicly, making it impossible to control their usage and measure results. Widespread leakage became so disruptive, that EE was forced to withdraw some of the codes completely, with their affiliate team finding it too much of a challenge to track true results.

There were also other challenges EE faced with their previous perk promotion, the team had to make product updates and changes to the system manually, which placed a huge administrative burden on them - it would take two people up to ten days of work to make any updates on over 1,500 partners’ multi-use codes!

EE wanted to bring back the benefits of rewarding their loyal consumers without the time, pressure and labour of their previous solution. Enter Uniqodo...

Uniqodo’s Solution

• Fortunately, Sachin knew Uniqodo had experience in solving this type of challenge for retailers and approached us at an industry event.
• EE Perk was originally built as a digital exclusive, which business clients could only sign up for via EE’s online affiliate platform. To overcome this constraint, Uniqodo designed and coded an extra layer to their system which helped EE to restructure how multi-use codes were being allocated to each partner.  They now have one simplified list of partner products and can generate large batches of secure, single-use codes on an ad-hoc basis for each.
• When EE wants to update any product or change its pricing, there is zero impact on the publishing partners.
• With Uniqodo, EE can make changes almost instantly, removing more than 95% of the administration overhead.
• EE has also enabled customers to redeem codes in 600 stores as well as via their customer service call centres, making it simple for their customers and resulting in an omnichannel approach to their perk scheme.
• Tracking sales and attributing them to a campaign, affiliate channel or business client is now much easier. Instead of spending time managing updates, Sachin has time to be creative with the strategy and marketing to source new partners for the offers.

We chose Uniqodo because no other supplier could do what we needed. When I talked to Uniqodo about our challenges with multi-use codes, it was clear they recognised our challenges from other retailers they’d worked with and understood the Affiliate Window model.

They’ll go the extra mile to solve your business challenge and they’re honest – they’ll very quickly tell you whether they can help and they’ve simplified the whole digital portal for our business clients.

By re-launching our EE Perk platform, we can offer our business clients an exclusive discount to enhance their employee benefits scheme to attract, retain and reward their staff.

I’d recommend Uniqodo because they absolutely know their stuff."

Sachin Thanki,  EE Performance Marketing Manager

More than 95% of administration overhead GONE

EE Perks increased to a client base of 1,500.

Promotions are now redeemable both online and in 600 stores.

All achieved with zero impact on publishing partners.