Based on research that shows sending patrons a promotional coupon worth a flat dollar amount does better than percentage off deals because recipients think of them as leaving cash on the table, we're implementing a Ballet Bucks campaign for our Nutcracker single ticket buyers. The promotion will be worth $50 off their next order with a hard deadline. I'm struggling with how to implement this though. Here's my thought process:
The promotional piece is ready to mail, so I can't change the offer. I'm hoping you've done something clever that I can shamelessly copy. If it works online in TNEW too I'll owe you one. Thanks!
*Also posting in the Marketing forum.
I know this is unhelpful right now, but never, never come up with a clever marketing idea and then do any work around it before seeing if it is possible to implement. That has brought us to grief more times than I can imagine, but I think (think) I have trained the marketing department well enough that we start with an idea but immediately stop to see if it is possible to implement and if not (probably 85% of the time!) we figure out what we _can_ do.
The only thing I can think is that if your tickets are uniformly $50+ you could make a -$50 rule that applies only to the first ticket.
Oh, one more thing, I don't know about Ohio, but some states do not allow you to set expirations on money offers like that.
8 months ago I asked the same question, and Kevin Sheenan (pricing rule expert and TN staff member replied):
Jessica,
Because the pricing rules are applied to each SLI, it is not possible to do a fixed amount off the order total. You can effectively do it for a percentage based discount if everything in the order qualifies for the pricing rule, because taking a percentage off of the sum of multiple tickets is the same as sum of each individual ticket's price reduced by that percentage.
I KNOW that is not the answer you want to hear, but it is not possible online. You can do it via the ticket office with the allocate function tho.
oh, those last two sentences are me....not Kevin :-)
Sara,
We've had the same issue here. A couple years ago, we physically printed out a number of vouchers and sent them to a select number of patrons. So in effect a gift certificate but we didn't call it that to get around the expiry. This way patrons could use it online. We were targeting a specific group of patrons so kept our numbers low so we didn't have to produce a lot of vouchers. The vouchers included the gift-certificate number.
Most recently, we did it as a promo with a per-ticket amount off so it didn't require any fancy footwork and could be handled within the constraints of Tessitura.
"never, never come up with a clever marketing idea and then do any work around it before seeing if it is possible to implement"
I need to get this made into a t-shirt (or at least pin it to my monitor)
We offer a monetary discount at checkout with Pricing Rules but only give £10 off which is less than our cheapest qualifying ticket, therefore it works fine with the SLI limitations of pricing rules. Perhaps I might suggest you lower the discount amount to within your lowest price ticket you want the offer to apply to? I know it's not ideal but this would at least give you something to use straight away and you could avoid the discount applying to contributions and contributions.Ideally I think we would all like Pricing Rules to deal with money off discounts...I did have a bit of an 'out-there' method for doing the larger discounted amount:
If you enable your web mode of sale to allow part paid orders and 'deduct' the value of the voucher from the final order total before sending the value to the payment gateway, the customer is allowed to purchase online with the discount. Of course, you're then left with your box office having to do manual adjustments afterwards but the illusion of magic is created for your customers. Your box office staff might hate me for suggesting it though!