How To Make Expiring Coupon Codes

Welcome to the User Experience series, where we build fun stuff inside your MV together.

In this episode we're going to make some coupon codes using the new "expiration date" feature, which allows you to add Urgency to an Offer... without having to stay awake until midnight to delete a coupon code when the Offer ends.

Follow along with me to set these up in your MV and then try them out in an Offer!

Audio version and text transcript below.  Thanks for listening and as always, please tag me in the MV #collab on Facebook with your wins, successes and comments.

AUDIO

TRANSCRIPT

Hey, I'm Steve knots. Welcome to the User Experience podcast where I help you build fun stuff inside your MemberVault account to get your users more engaged, racking up points, unlocking bonuses, having fun coming back again and again and again, which translates to better relationships with you and more success in your business.

And of course, this is an interactive podcast, which means we can build stuff now, I'll show you how to do it, you can pause, do it yourself in your account. And after a short little podcast episode, 15 minutes or something like that, you'll have some serious progress that's going to help you get further along in your business.

So today, the topic is coupon codes, we just pushed an update where coupon codes can now be set to expire. So you don't have to stay up until midnight on the day of your launch, closing your cart or closing your coupon code or removing the option to get the discount. Now you can set it and go to bed and have a good night's sleep. So you'll be fresh like a daisy in the morning to handle all your customer service, comments and testimonials and responses and all that kind of stuff.

You know what I'm talking about, it can be really handy to have an expiration date on your coupon code, maybe you want to run a launch, maybe you want to have a special offer that ends on a Black Friday day for shopping or whatever you're trying to do, it can really be useful to give people the urgency to make them click the button and take out their card and put in the numbers and buy your product because it's going to not going to stop being available. It's a cool strategy.

So let's look at how we do that. We're going to look at coupon codes today for multiple payment options like pay at once versus pay on monthly installment plans, and setting them to expire. Where to find the link for coupon codes. And then at the end, we're going to have a special extra little bonus of something else. It's too small for its own episode. But it's a new update, you might be able to figure it out by looking at the screen I'm looking at. And I like to put little secret bonuses in here. What do you think of the new features? So awesome, I can't even handle it, then my head exploded. I'm not going to send that into Mike.

So how do you make a coupon code let's start at the beginning. So first we go to products. Let's say I want to work with escape the eight bar loop that's a course in how to make music stop being repetitive extended out to be longer and not sound like it's an electronic loop. That's what it's all about. First step click into your products. I'll just slow down long enough for you to do that.

Now along with me, I want you to collapse the modules window or field because we're not going to edit that. Also click on the word product settings and just collapsed that collapse that whole section, we're going to edit setup options. So I'll give you a second to pause. Pick your product, get into the signup options, and then press play when you're done. pause pause pause.

Alright now we're back in the signup options you can see this is the signup type is payment. Now you're not going to be able to create coupons if it's a form or a link signup. Coupon Codes only work when they're purchasing inside MemberVault. So you have to have your product set to payment.

Now we have the payment options, which are named pay at once steel, or down below there is three monthly payments. And what you want to do is set up the same coupon code in both your payment options. Here we have in the three month, three monthly payments, coupon name, you can type whatever you want, keep it short, and some people like to make it sneaky, like with actual code. So my coupon name here is called "springsale". And an example of being sneaky would be to change the letter S to the number five, so that people can't, you know, hack your coupon code. So pause for a quick second, think of a name for your coupon code. Pause, pause, pause, and we're back on the snaps.

So my coupons name is spring sale. I'm going to copy that and go up to the other payment plan, which is the pay at once. You can see I've got a few coupon codes from past offers. So the coupon name is pay at once. Let's scroll down here. Aha, there it is spring sale, it also exists on that payment plan 50% discount. And there's some more stuff down there. There's the expiration date. So step one is create the coupon code, give it a name, and make sure you're using the same code for both payment plans. So that when people go to your product, here's my MemberVault marketplace.

The course is called Escape The 8-Bar Loop, I'm going to click Buy now. And you can see when this window pops open. Here we have the two payment options. And it's cool that the title shows up. It says pay at once best deal, or full price or three monthly payments. And it helps a lot to name your payment options so people can easily see they're asking the question, which payment options should I choose? And you're telling them the answer is choose the one that's the best deal. The 297 is cheaper than 108 times three. So that's what we're doing.

Now let's test if our coupon codes are working on both payment options, you do not want people to get to your course and they try to pay in three installments and the coupon code doesn't work. They're going to be like what the heck. So I type in spring sale. Aha look at that the price drops right there and goes down to the law rate. And if I click on three monthly payments, delete the coupon code.

Let's just check spring sale. Okay, and it chops the price in half. Now, I don't know you might want might want to do 20% instead of 50% or something like that. So back in our admin in the coupon name, you can choose your amount, I could easily make this 20% or I could choose a discount of $20. So that's going to take the amount to $20. Let's edit that down in the spring sale multiple payment options, instead of percent making amount and let's pretend these are going to be never expire. So they never expire is like the original coupon setup where you just have a code, it's always going to be there until you delete the coupon code.

Now, make sure, you can click outside the frame, and you'll see it auto saves up in the upper right corner. But I like to with coupon codes, I like to scroll down and click the actual Save button, just to make sure it goes through the system somehow, sometimes you can create a button, just to make sure it goes through the system somehow, sometimes you can create a coupon code and it doesn't show up unless you click the sale button. So click click the Save button to make sure.

Now let's refresh our page. And there's the purchase. Okay, full price, let's type in spring sale, aha, it knocked off $25 rather than 50%. And that's really handy because sometimes your prices, you might you might want to just give people a certain amount off like in your promo, you could say, hey, save 20 bucks, if the price point is right, or, you know, save $100 on this big program.

And sometimes that dollar amount can be the trigger that makes people click the button to buy it. Or sometimes they react to a percentage Wow, 20% off or 25%. Often, I've received marketing where like with a with a new mattress. And I look at on Instagram. And first I get a message. It's like, Hey, here's a coupon code for 10% on your first purchase. And then I go to the website and I look at it. And then the next time I get a message, they say hey, here's 20% off on the mattress you were looking at. So they're targeting me specifically with the product and giving me an increased discount sequentially.

So that's where percentages can be really fun. And guess what, by using engagement points and hot leads and quiz answers and stuff. You can do that at MemberVault. You can have cascading coupon codes where the first time they come to the product, they get a welcome email that says or a response email that says, Hey, I saw you're looking at this product. Why don't you come back in and take another look. And here's a 10% discount.

And then if they rack up a few engagement points, like say you give them a one click link, they come in, they browse through your teaser module, get a couple of points. And then you can say, hey, wow, this person is interesting. Then you can send them another message that says here's a 20% discount on that product you were looking at, it really can go into a cool a lot of cool places. And now with expiration dates, you can tie those messages to specific moments. And that's that's a lot of fun.

So where are we at? We've proved that the payment plans both work with a coupon code for a fixed percentage, or $1 amount. And now let's just add the last piece, where we're going to go to our spring sale coupon code and set it to expire on March 31. At 11:30pm. That means on March 31, I can go to bed at 1129. I don't have to stay up till 1130. I can promote a sale let people know April 1, this sale is over you got to buy it during the month of March. And I want to make sure that both my coupon codes are synchronized. I catch the details they expire on the date, march 31 11:30pm. I can click outside the frame to autosave it but I just want to make sure down at the bottom, I click the Save button.

So let's pause here. I want you to take your product that you're going to do a discount your coupon code with the text of the coupon name, whatever the name is, and go into your different payment options. Enter your coupon code, set it up to expire on never if you choose or a date if you're in the middle of actually launching something right now. And fill out those fields.

Write down your questions if you have any questions. So you can tag me in the collab on Facebook and let me know what's going on. And make sure you fill out the accurate details for the amount of the discount and choose If the amount is a percentage or $1. Figure. I told you to pause I'm still talking. So pause.

And we're back. Now you have your coupon code set up ready to go with the percentage you choose the expiration date. And you're ready to promote that using your one click links. Well, how do I find my coupon code, let's just review that, in case you might have forgotten.

So the product is called Escape the eight bar loop I'm going to click back out to content products and the navigation bar. Here's my list of products I go down to escape the eight bar loop. Instead of clicking the little pencil tool for the Edit, I'm going to click the gear icon to the right side kind of aligned with the word action. So pause while you navigate over there and click that gear icon.

And we're back. Now you can see escape the eight bar loop options. It's a pop up window with three different links. The top one is the product link that just gets people to that product, which is kind of like let's show you on the screen. They close the checkout window.

So here's my front marketplace at the main link courses dot mixitecture.com. When you click into one of your products this link is referred to as the product link. So that just shows you the main window of your promo text. In other words, the stuff you have During the promo text field on your product, that's what you get to from the main product link, we want to do the direct purchase link. This is the one that has the ending that says action equals sign up, that link is going to open the sidebar window. And to take it a step farther, you have a little drop down menu with your coupon codes, I can pick the spring sale, those are two codes showing up twice, because there's two payment plans. So I select that coupon code, you scroll to the right, you can see at the end of the product link, it says View slash three.

So that's product ID number three, action equals signup, that little field is going to make the sidebar pop open with the checkout cart. And then coupon equals spring sale means when that window pops open, it's going to have the coupon code already applied. So let's go to this demo tab, I'm going to paste in that link, hit the enter button.

Wow, look at that. Did you see that the window, open the page, the page loaded the window open, I saw the numbers and started to freak out and then the coupon activated and the price dropped. That is pretty cool. Especially if your people see that when they click an email the window opens. And they actually see that whole thing happened.

You know what, that would be a great GIF. If you could screen record the process of that page loading with the coupon code and the price dropping. And then at the end, you just like highlight it with yellow or something that'd be an awesome GIF to put into an email like watch what happens when you click this link and it blinks with the price dropping, I would enjoy that. Personally, I don't know if you're into GIFs as much as we are on Team MV. But, you know, if you want to go to the next level, you could pause here and make a gift. Okay, hope your gift looks good. So that is how you find your coupon code link. And that's all you have to do. And now this coupon code is all set up to work with either payment plan. And it's going to expire on March 31.

So I can get to work writing my emails and telling people Hey, product is here, doing a sale, buy it during the month of March or else you lose your chance. And then I don't have to remind myself to go and delete the coupon code. It's okay if I forget until April 7. And I can delete the code later keeps your business consistent to make sure that you are delivering what you offer. You're promising what's going to happen. And you're not doing that fake urgency thing of like only 100 copies left or sign up now before the seats run out for our virtual webinar. You know, you want to be authentic and honest about stuff. And sometimes you do need to push people a little bit and say here is the limit. Here's the timeline. This is when you have to make a decision. But sometimes people won't make a decision until you give them a hard limit.

And that is all you have to do. It's that easy. We just did it during this podcast to set up some coupon codes that are going to work.

And like I said, we have a special little bonus, there's a new feature for setting a homepage in your account. This is brand new, MemberVault we like to explore the MVP process: minimum viable product.

So for example, if the question is how do I do transportation -- Should I start a car company like like and make a whole car? Well, if the product if the problem you're trying to solve is transportation, let's start with a bicycle, you know, maybe we can just buy a bicycle to get from here to there. And then next we can have a motorcycle, and work on that. And then once we figure out all the engine details, then we'll make a car that you actually drive. So you start with a minimum minimum thing that's going to work.

In this case, setting a homepage to MemberVault, or setting your MemberVault account to have a home page is just something we added so that you can make a new page in the pages feature, and then set it up to be your homepage.

So first, what you have to do is in the content section, you have to create a page. Otherwise, there's nothing to set. And I have basic mixing per house and techno that's like a sales page, I had some templates that are inactive, but this page is active. So you go down to settings and click Account Settings homepage, look at that right there. Instead of the main products page, which is mine tab. Let me get back to my main MemberVault page here. Courses dot mixitecture.com.

This URL is now showing the main products page with a list of everything in my binge and buy marketplace. Instead of that. I want my link to go to the page for basic mixing for house and techno click save. Now when I refresh this page, or when I refresh this link, look what comes up. Aha, this is basically the sales page for that course. And that is loading up at courses dot mixitecture.com. And the last little detail is you might not want the welcome section to appear at the top of whatever page you're loading. For example, you can have your blog page, be here.

So if that's what you want to do, you can go back to your settings, appearance. Welcome area. And this is really fun because it's so easy to do. Up at the top of the welcome area settings, there's a field called Show welcome area. And you just select No.

click outside the frame, auto save back to your preview tab reload. And look at that. Now when I go to my main subdomain or your main customer domain. The page loads up with a video on top and that's all you have to do to make whatever page you want load up as the homepage on your account.

Now I'm going to go back through and undo this stuff because I'm not ready to have that page active yet. So welcome area show welcome area. Yes. Where was that again? Oh settings, open Settings, Account Settings. On page, select main products page. Click Save. Now am I done?

Should I go get some coffee?

No, I'm not done. I'm going to go back to my preview tab, reload. And I'm always going to check that what I did happened and worked because you don't want to go making changes in your admin. And then forget to preview it. You always want to make sure you can see what your people are going to see when they come in.

And this is looking good. I got my announcement bar on top logo. Welcome video. Welcome, welcome, welcome. I'm going to move that welcome area go down here and I see my products and everything all in order with escape to a power loop ready to go with a coupon code that's going to expire on March 31. And that is what you do to set up a coupon code with an expiration date for all of your payment plans.

So people can come in, consume your teaser module rack up some EP, earn a members discount, get an email with a one click link with a coupon code populated in the link, click the link come in see the sidebar and all they have to do is hit the buy button and they're gonna directly enter the product and get to work on the lessons.It's so cool. It is absolutely the best trail of cookies to have fun stuff, leading people to make a purchase and become part of your community. Super fun. What's easier than that?

Watch this now for the interactive podcast. We're gonna pause till the next episode. Thanks for listening. I'll see you next time.