Offers guide

Offers are automatically generated, personalized discounts that are sent to existing payment plan customers to drive repeat purchases.

Kritika Whitaker avatar
Written by Kritika Whitaker
Updated over a week ago

Offers in Paythen let you send customers an automated personalized offer via email once they complete a certain amount of their current payment plan. You can set progress either as a percentage of the plan if the offer applies to multiple / all plans (eg: 50% progress, 100% progress, etc) or as an individual number of payments if it applies only to one plan (eg: Send offer when a customer completes the 5th payment on XYZ payment plan).

At the moment, there is only one type of offer available – Discount code offers. For this offer type, a discount code is automatically generated and emailed to customers that meet the offer criteria you have set. Over time, offers functionality will expand to include other types of offers and incentives that help you drive more sales and repeat purchases.

Getting started

To get started with offers, switch it ON under the early access tab in settings. This feature is currently in early access. Core functionality is stable and will work reliably but reporting and other functions are limited. You may also notice minor bugs for edge cases. This is being rapidly improved upon (with your feedback).

Once you've switched it ON, you will see a new "Offers" menu item at the top. Click on this and then click Create a new offer to create your first offer.

We recommend trying out this demo to receive an example offer email so you have a clear understanding of how it will work for your customers.

Offer setup

Most fields here are self-explanatory. We explain some key ones and recommended values below:

Offer type

At the moment you can only choose a Discount code offer – which automatically generates a personalized discount code for each customer who becomes eligible to receive it. They can use these discount codes on any other plans from your Paythen account. You can direct them to specific plans by including links to them in the email (we'll expand on this below. Gift card offers are coming soon too.

Expiring an offer

Depending on your business and how often customers tend to buy from you, we suggest considering an expiry period. This helps create urgency. Or can also incentivize customers to share it with friends or family in case they aren't ready to make another purchase.

If you set an expiry period, the offer will automatically expire after that period for each customer – this is based on when it is generated. So if you set a 7 day expiry, then each customer's offer will expire 7 days after being generated. If you're not sure, try a 30 day expiry or consider leaving it off to start with. You can change this later as needed.

Discount type

Choose a fixed or % discount type and whether you want the discount to be a one-time thing off the first payment only (for payment plans or subscriptions) or whether you want the discount to apply to all payments. If you choose a fixed amount discount, remember it can only be used on plans in the same currency.

Who should get the offer?

You can choose to send the offer to customers on all plans, or ones on some/specific plans, depending on your business.

The easiest and fastest approach is to choose Customers on all plans and set a specific progress percentage - eg: 50%, 80% or to trigger on plan completion, 100%. If you choose a progress % and all plans, then if you've set it at say 50%, customers on plans with four installments will get it after their second payment, and ones on plans with 10 installments will get an offer after their fifth payment.

However, if you want a more tailored approach, you can choose to trigger offers for one / a few plans only and create separate offers for different plans.

Eg: for customers on higher priced plans, you might want to offer them a bigger incentive off their next purchase - eg: a 25% discount, whereas those on lower priced plans, you might only offer 10%

When you select more than one, or all plans, you can only choose customer progress as a percentage. However, if you choose a single plan, you will notice the "When should the offer be sent" field input and text will change to allow you to enter a specific number of payments.

This makes it more specific, eg: if you have a plan with 10 installments and only want to send offers to people that have completed their 9th payment, you can do so. For another plan, if you wanted to send customers an offer after 5 installments, you can do that. This approach also lets you set different custom text to include with each offer email.

Custom text in the offer email

This is an optional but strongly recommended option. You can choose to include custom text that will appear in the offer email for customers. This lets you clarify where and how to use the offer, and even include links to specific plans where you want them to redeem this offer.

If you want to encourage them to share this single-use offer with their friends or family, this is where you can mention this also. If your customers don't typically make repeat purchases often, you could encourage them to share it with someone they know. This can be especially effective if you've set an expiry period for the offer.

This custom text can include links, formatting and even emoji. Use it to clarify the offer conditions, encourage specific behavior and let customers know what to do next and where and how to redeem their offer.

Use the custom text field to provide customers a clear call to action including links to where and how they should use the offer.

Now click save and preview. We'll show you a static preview of the email your customers will get and a toggle to activate the offer. Over time, this will be a more detailed summary and potentially a dynamic preview based on your chosen offer settings.

Your offer is now saved and ready to go-live. You can activate it immediately or come back to it later and activate it.

As soon as you activate it, customers who meet those conditions from that point onwards will begin receiving offer emails. Customers that met the conditions before you activated this offer or while the offer is inactive will not receive any offer emails.

Understanding if your offers are effective

Once your offers are active and begin sending, you will start seeing updated numbers on the offers dashboard:

This will show you sent vs. used offers and calculate effectiveness based off that, as well as a "Revenue" number that shows you how much revenue each offer drove. The revenue number is the total of each plan a customer signed up to using their personal offer code. Eg: If a customer uses their offer code to sign up to a plan that has a total payment amount of $4,200 then the revenue figure will show that.

Revenue is always shown in your base currency so if a customer signed up to a plan in another currency, the amount shown is based on the exchange rate at the time they signed up. Over time this revenue number will be more granular and additional reporting will be added.

Editing an existing offer

You can change the offer status (active / inactive) or edit any offer details at any time via the more menu next to each offer on the dashboard:

We recommend trying out this demo to receive an example offer email so you have a clear understanding of how it will work for your customers.

That's it! We'd love to hear your feedback, questions or advice on how we can improve offers for you. Need a hand setting up offers? Just ask. Over time, we expect to add various types of offers to help you drive more sales and repeat business. If you have any questions, just ask us via the chat icon.

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