More Sales and Happier Customers: One-Time Discount Codes and Easy Email Popups in Shopify

Lately, we’ve been hearing a lot about two problems people are having with their Shopify stores, that are costing them sales and goodwill from their customers.

So for this post, we’re going to troubleshoot these issues, so that you can sidestep them all together in your business: setting up one-time discount codes, and how to do email pop-ups right.

How To Set Up Single Use Discount Codes In Shopify:

For an e-commerce platform, this has been a surprisingly big issue for Shopify.

If you want to offer a one-time or single-use coupon (that allows every customer to use a particular coupon once at your store), it’s been quite a difficult function for people to implement on Shopify. Thread after thread on forums are asking how to do it, and most of the time, the answer is ‘Sorry – can’t help you.’

But there is a solution… and you don’t have to be technical (or even install an app) to get single-use discount codes up and running on your store.

Now, it’s a little bit tricky, because the actual discount engine in Shopify doesn’t allow for multiple individual uses of a single code. It allows you to have a coupon for one use overall time, or a particular number of uses overall time, but not a single use per person overall time.  

That’s annoying because you don’t want people using your ‘new customer’ coupon if they’ve already bought from you 3 times.

However, Shopify actually has documentation for this issue. It’s just hard to find and seems complicated to implement. But once you know what you’re looking for, it’s a fairly simple fix.

Here’s a quick overview of the process:

1. Go to your customer section
2. Filter your customers according to the conditions you want
3. Save the search and give it a name (this is a customer group)
4. Go to your discount section
5. Select ‘customers in group’ and which customer group you want to offer the discount to and save.

Here’s the step-by-step:

Go into Shopify’s customer section:

From there, you can create groups.

For example, you might want to create a group for people who haven’t purchased anything from your store before. To create a filter for that group, selecting the relevant conditions:

Click ‘add filter’, and then enter the name of the new saved search (such as ‘Never Purchased Before’, since the customers won’t see this name).

Once that’s done, it’s time to create your discount code. The customers will see the name of the code, so make sure it’s user-friendly. ‘Welcome’ might be a good option for this particular group:

Save the discount as you usually would, and now you’re ready to give out single-use discount codes to customers in that group.

Be sure to mention to these new customers that they’ll need to create an account or log in to be able to use the code.

This is because Shopify will check their email address against the record of existing customers, and if they’re not logged in, the system is unable to complete the check (unfortunately there’s no way around this at the moment).

Once someone from the ‘Never Purchased Before’ customer group uses the ‘Welcome’ code, Shopify will automatically remove the group tag so they are no longer eligible to use the discount.

You can make groups for all kinds of things, such as having purchased over a certain amount, completed a particular action and so on. It can be quite a diverse function once you’ve got it set up!

How To Make Great Email Pop-Ups:

If you spend any time looking at marketing blogs, you’ll be familiar with the idea that you must have an email pop-up on your site to capture email addresses from your traffic.

And while that’s definitely good practice, there’s also an art to it.

You’ve probably been on websites before and experienced a barrage of pop-ups that just won’t leave you alone. Maybe there are multiple windows, or the exit button’s not obvious, or the call to action is obviously what was in the software template… pop-ups like that do more harm than good.

Unfortunately, many of the apps available on Shopify for email pop-ups are no good – putting customers off rather than pulling them in, and charging you a monthly fee to do it!

But again, there is a solution. And again, you don’t have to be highly technical to make it work.

SumoMe is a very versatile piece of software that is specifically designed to capture the details of people visiting your website. It’s highly customizable and has various solutions available so that you can pick the option that’s right for your business.

Now, a few people have mentioned that SumoMe seems like it might be a bit hard to use… but all you have to do is sign up for a free account, copy and paste a few lines of code into your theme.liquid file, hit save, and you’re ready to go.

When you sign up, they give you a step by step guide on where to paste the code (with the exact location). Once that’s done, you can go through each of the features and customize them to fit your brand, with offers that will grab each visitor’s attention.

SumoMe offers multiple options for collecting email addresses:

• List Builder (a classic pop-up box, with various sizes & templates)
• Scroll Box (a pop-up that only shows after the visitor has spent a certain amount of time reading a page on your site
• Welcome Mat (a landing page that shows when a visitor first arrives & disappears once they move on)
• Smart Bar (a small header bar that makes a simple call to action that involves leaving their email address)

You can use any of these tools individually, or in any combination you like. It’s easy to change the style and message of each tool, so you’re not stuck with a pop-up that’s not up to date.

SumoMe also has quite advanced display options – you can determine which pages the tools should show on, and how often, so that you’re not bugging people or showing them anything irrelevant. Being able to make a targeted offer at an appropriate time is a very powerful way to get a visitor to become a subscriber.

Want to know more about common mistakes that e-commerce business owners make? Get the report below to make sure your business is in the best shape possible!

Thank you for showing interest in our Shopify Insider Blog @ Blackbelt Commerce. Please make sure to check out our products. We also have some top blog recommendations for you to check out; Shopify Incoming Sales, SEO For Your Shopify Store, how to reduce bounce rate on your shopify store, 3 ways to increase your shopify conversion, and  Shopify Store and Customer Service. As always, keep a lookout for new blog posts.

Do you have any questions? Let us know in the comments below and we will answer as soon as possible.