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Discount code ideas to boost your e-commerce business

Discount code ideas to boost your e-commerce business
James Chetwode
James ChetwodeWe are Chain Ltd

Posted: Mon 27th Jun 2022

No one likes to give too much away, but sometimes you need to employ every trick in the marketing handbook, and one of these is the discount code.

Especially now, with the cost of living crisis, we are seeing more and more customers looking for discounts.

In this guide, we share with you our best ideas to generate more business for your Shopify store using discount codes.

"This month, we learned that 70% of consumers across surveyed countries say they are concerned about the rising cost of the items they need or want to buy”, says Think With Google.

As opposed to cutting your prices, offering a discount is a seriously good way to entice your customers to buy from you. It not only saves them money, but it can also give them a warm fuzzy feeling, knowing they have been given something by you.

A lot of online shoppers will have explored the product offline and be looking for the best bargain they can find. If they regularly shop online, they know some of the tricks of the trade already:

  • Signing up for a subscription newsletter can lead to an automatic discount

  • Leaving a full basket can trigger a discount

  • Searching for vouchers is another route

  • Reward for a photo review

  • Loyalty rewards

  • Referral rewards

How do you as a business owner ensure you have covered all of these bases?

In this blog, we will cover the ones we recommend using the Shopify Platform. All of these ideas are ones we regularly implement ourselves and on behalf of our clients.

Sign up for newsletter discounts

Building a database of subscribers is one of the most important things you can do as an online shop owner.

Sending out regular emails can generate a whole lot of business, virtually for free, depending on the size of your database and the email system you use.

This can lead to added value for your business when it comes to selling up. The value of a mailing list is huge if handled correctly.

One way to encourage people to sign up is to offer a discount for doing so. These offers are usually made available on the homepage of the website as a banner or as a pop-up.

You can easily add an offer to your homepage by including the offer in the text of your subscription bar.

The pop-up discount

When you visit a lot of websites, you will almost immediately be interrupted by a pop-up.

Sometimes these can be set up well or very badly, and Google doesn’t reward you for interrupting visitors (more in our SEO blogs on that). How do you set up a pop-up in Shopify?

There are several ways to install a pop-up subscription offer with Shopify, so let's deal with the easiest.

Use the in-built pop-up that's built into a lot of themes. When you are in the customiser, go to theme settings and see if there is a pop-up option at the bottom.

Themes from Out of the Sandbox have these pop-ups ready for use. You can then generate a discount code and put it into the success text for signing up for an email.

You can also use the inbuilt Shopify Mail app. Install the app onto your store if you don’t want to go with an external app like Mailchimp or Klavyio.

There are multiple marketing options and one of them is pop-up. Follow the instructions and add your code to the success message.

Competition rewards

When you run a competition, it is usually to build your audience or build brand awareness.

The effort that goes into a competition should never be wasted. So instead of just giving away a single prize, why not give everyone who entered a discount code as a thank you for entering the competition?

They may well be people who wouldn’t think about shopping at your store normally.

Loyalty rewards

When we send out a newsletter, we quite often include a discount code for our subscribers as a thank you for following us.

Sometimes, we even segment our database into people who have shopped more than once with us and give them an even bigger reward.

If you have enough information you can really make your marketing sing by targeting the right people and making them feel good.

Referral rewards

We all want more customers and what better way to get them than by offering a reward to your current customers for introducing their friends and families to you?

You can generate discount codes both for your current customers and for their friends if they use the code.

Abandoned basket discount

Platforms like Shopify are brilliant if used to their full capability.

The analytic capability of your online shop is staggering and if you know how to look you can check the abandoned basket rate.

This can be very scary and point to problems with your checkout or pricing. It may also point to the fact that you don’t have an abandoned basket offer.

A shopper may have gotten distracted at checkout, or felt the price was too high. Why not send them a discount code a few hours after they have tried to check out.

It may sound complicated, but it isn’t. Shopify Mail lets you do this as do most email platforms. It is a quick win and might generate an extra 10% of sales over the year.

Review reward discounts

Why not reward your customers when they review your products? This can be especially useful if you are after photographs and videos.

There are some very good apps out there to help you achieve this. We recommend Loox - this can be set up to automatically ask your reviewers to upload photos and rewards them for doing so.

Offering discounts to people who click a link

This is a very useful tool if you are featured in an article or add your company to a discount company.

You can generate a discount that will automatically be applied at checkout if the visitors use the link provided.

In Shopify, you just generate the discount and then click “promote”. This will generate a shareable link. Anyone using this link will get a discount at checkout.


Connect with James on Enterprise Nation for more support in this area.

James Chetwode
James ChetwodeWe are Chain Ltd

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