Ask us: What are the different types of marketing campaigns that a subscription startup can run in Chargebee?

Chargebee coupons are designed for the simplest use case of giving away a promotional discount to fellow startups all the way to running those huge marketing campaigns that can go viral and boost your sales funnel.

Here are some ways in which our customers use Chargebee coupons to run their subscription business.

Configuration & setup of coupons:

To create a coupon: go to Product Catalog > Coupons > Create A New Coupon
There are a number of fields that you would have to fill based on the discount type, the duration and the validity of the coupon. Also coupons may be applied on Plans as well as Addons.

A few scenarios:

Fee waiver:

Assuming your startup allows customers to try out the product before they convert to paying customers. When a customer is on trial, you generally reach out to customers, this is an excellent way to build relationships and understand your customer better. This can also be used to encourage your customer to convert sooner. Set up a simple one month 100% off coupon that is applicable on select plans to run this campaign. And share the coupon codes via emails to your trial users.

Run campaigns via marketplaces or channel partners:

Create channel-specific promotions, by creating a bunch of coupon codes that can be distributed in certain marketplaces. Any customer who discovers your service using this marketplace could use the coupon & avail the discount.

Beta offer:

When you launch a new feature that is charged as an add-on, you can run a campaign to invite beta users who get this feature alone for free.
Example: Create a 100% off coupon code that is applicable only to that addon. The invoice will automatically display these line items with a clear description indicating that a discount has been applied to that addon.

It is a win-win to recruit beta users this way for your new product feature.

Referral Program:

You can run a viral marketing campaign by running a referral program. Assume you want to give away some discount every time a customer recommends another paying customer to you and you want to reward both the referrer and referee.
You can implement using our API and extend our custom fields feature.
You can make use of the coupon code & the coupon set feature together to pull off this implementation without worrying about how you pass the discount to the appropriate party.

Campaign by distributing a number of coupon codes:

When you are looking to run a massive marketing campaign to distribute thousands of coupon codes through channels like LivingSocial or Groupon, you can generate a number of codes based on a simple associated coupon. Upload the coupon sets and when customers sign up they automatically get the discount that is redeemed only once for each customer.

Although discount coupons are a great way of running a marketing/promotional campaign, when done in moderation could be a great way to boost your signups as well as increase the number of customers in your sales funnel. Discounts could also be the cause of major revenue leakage for your company.

Now it’s your turn, to experiment and let us know how they worked out for you. Have you come across other interesting ways to run promotions? Let us know.