Essilor is a global player in corrective lenses and instruments for ophthalmologists and opticians. To boost sales in the various retail outlets in France, Essilor launched an impressive SMS coupon campaign.
Campaign setup
The coupon was created using the Coupontools software. Coupontools designed 2 coupon variants because Essilor would distribute the coupon through 2 distribution channels, SMS and WhatsApp. This allowed Essilor to identify which channel the customer used most often to receive the coupon. Thanks to a CRM integration that each store had access to, the cashiers could securely validate the coupons. Unique validation codes were imported into the coupon. An intelligent API call checked if it was a valid validation code. If it was a valid code, the coupon was validated, and customers could no longer use it.
The most exciting part of this campaign was the distribution. Because Essilor had been confronted with fraud in the past, they decided to do things differently this time. Essilor promoted the coupon through posters in the various stores. Store visitors could participate in 2 ways. On the one hand, by sending an SMS message to a shortcode. In response, the sender received a message with the digital coupon URL. The other way was by scanning a QR code. Thanks to this QR code, WhatsApp was automatically opened, and the text to be sent was already ready. In response to this message, the sender received the coupon URL. The significant advantage of this distribution method? Control over who receives what and how many coupons. Each number sending a message was assigned a unique coupon. Once a person redeemed their coupon, they couldn't use it anymore. If a store visitor tried to send another message to the shortcode, he would receive the same coupon again. The same story if he tried again with WhatsApp. Both approaches had access to the same database to check if the person has already received the coupon.
A reminder message was sent one month before the coupon expired to those who had not redeemed it to boost conversions. This campaign was a great success and resulted in numerous useful statistics. Essilor knew exactly how many people participated, had redeemed the coupon, and which store was responsible for the most validations.
Why this approach?
Mainly because Essilor had to deal with massive fraud in the past. Thanks to the advanced approach of Coupontools, fraud was excluded. Each phone number was entitled to one coupon and could only use one coupon. Thanks to digital coupons, Essilor also knows perfectly who participated, redeemed the coupon, and which store was the most popular.
Campaign summary
- Coupon created by and with Coupontools
- Regular coupon
- Data capture
- Distribution through SMS/WhatsApp
- Unique coupon per phone number
- Single-use
- A/B test
- Validation
- POS generated barcodes
- CRM integration
- API call
- Statistics
- Customer data
- Campaign information
- Participants
- Total number of coupons redeemed
- Total number of redemptions per store.
