This is the fifth in a series of posts on price plan components.

Everyone knows that coupons are a great way to promote your product or service.

Discounts can be used to win back old customers, reward loyal customers, and attract new customers.

No matter what business you are in the ability to offer discounts is something you should be able to do quickly and easily.

There are three main types of discounts for coupons price plan components:

• Free Trial
• Percent
• Dollar amount

From a marketing perspective the ability to create, manage, and track campaigns that offer discounts and free trials should be easy; after all it’s one of the best ways to attain their customer acquisition and retention goals. Unfortunately, for many organizations, this capability doesn’t exist and marketing has to wait for IT to create the coupons, manage the campaign time frames and even access and send them the reports.  The marketing team’s hands are tied because flexibility is restricted by the billing system.

Instead of hindering your ability to promote your business, your billing service should:

• Allow for the automation of one-time or ongoing discounts, coupons, and free trials.
• The capability to control marketing campaign timing so Marketing can create and administer coupons for either fixed or percentage based discounts on their schedule without having to wait for backend changes.
• Provide easy access to real time analytics, metrics, and other information to everyone who needs it.

A robust automated billing and payments platform should include a Coupon price plan component module that makes it easy to:

• Choose the type of coupon, whether it be a specific dollar amount, percentage off price, or free period.
• Add unique names, description and codes to make your coupons easy to keep track of.
• Apply a coupon to all of your components or to pick a specific component to apply it to.
• Include an expiry date.
• Include easy to access and understand reports so you know which promotions are working and which need to be tweaked.

Most people in marketing have a horror story about a billing system causing problems for a campaign they were trying to run. We’d love to hear yours!