Help Shoppers Redeem Coupons
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- List the products needed to offer coupons and gain insights into what your shoppers want.
- Find resources for implementing this solution.
Unit word count: 600
Send and Track Coupon Redemption
By now, Isabelle Givens, digital marketer for Northern Trails Outfitters (NTO), is Pia and Charlotte’s biggest fan. She loves being able to send emails to shoppers about the items they purchased—and the items they left behind in their cart. But has she realized all her dreams? No. She’s sure that NTO can do even more to engage customers, now that Salesforce B2C Commerce and Marketing Cloud are integrated.
Isabelle is ready to talk to Pia about the next item on her wish list: coupons. NTO runs a number of coupon campaigns throughout the year, but Isabelle isn’t happy with the response rate they’ve been seeing.
NTO’s latest campaign, for example—Coupons for Crampons—was a dud, even though everyone knows that a crampon is a traction device you attach to your footwear to make hiking or mountain climbing on snow and ice more secure. Maybe NTO should have run the crampon coupon campaign in winter instead of summer? Maybe the picture of the product looks too much like a scary spider? Maybe NTO shoppers don’t like saving money?
Pia sees that Isabelle is on a slippery slope with her questions, so she assures her that she and Charlotte will look into the coupon redemption solution kit.
What Products Does This Solution Require?
NTO already has the products required for this solution.
- B2C Commerce (SFRA; to access this GitHub repository, log in using your Commerce Cloud Account Manager credentials)
- Marketing Cloud Enterprise 2.0
- Journey Builder
- Journey Builder
As in the previous solutions, the coupon redemption solution uses the Marketing Cloud Connector for B2C Commerce to integrate Marketing Cloud and B2C Commerce.
This connector is already configured for NTO, so Pia and Charlotte get to work studying the solution kit workflow diagram, to see how coupons are generated in B2C Commerce, exported to Marketing Cloud, and used in coupon redemption journeys. After shoppers redeem their coupons in B2C Commerce, the redemption data is pushed back to Marketing Cloud for processing. Sending redemption data back to Marketing Cloud is important, because Pia doesn’t want NTO to send reminder emails to customers who already used their coupon.
Consider Scale
The NTO storefront sometimes experiences bursts of traffic, when many coupons are redeemed per second, so Pia talks with her Marketing Cloud account executive about support for high-traffic use cases. And Charlotte plans to use an API that supports request queuing for a scalable capture of coupon redemption data.
Now that they have a plan in place to build for scale, the NTO team is ready to configure B2C Commerce and Marketing Cloud to support coupon redemption.
Bring Coupon Redemption Data into Marketing Cloud
Since NTO wants to track when coupons are redeemed and use that information in customer journeys, the development team sets up a data extension in Marketing Cloud to store the data. For the initial setup, the team exports data from B2C Commerce, then manually imports it into the new Marketing Cloud coupon redemption data extension. To update the data extension as new coupons are redeemed, they create a service in B2C Commerce to send coupon redemptions to Marketing Cloud via the Data Events API. They also extend the storefront to check for redeemed coupons after an order has been completed.
Isabelle and the marketing team feel like they’re on top of the world, now that they have a firm grip on how their coupon campaigns are doing. Thanks to the coupon redemption data extension, they can track coupon performance and design smart journeys that take redemption status into account.
