How to Send Unique, Time-Sensitive Shopify Discount Codes to New Mailchimp Subscribers

How to Send Unique, Time-Sensitive Shopify Discount Codes to New Mailchimp Subscribers

What is Coupon Carrier?

Coupon Carrier is a promotional tool to help you gain email subscribers or foot traffic by delivering unique time-sensitive discounts and coupons to your email subscribers — Connects directly to your favorite email service provider and e-commerce platform.

Discount codes for new signups

A commonly used way to incentivize visitors to sign up to your email list is to give them a discount code to use towards their first purchase. Most store owners send out a fixed discount code to all new subscribers, and there are several problems with this approach:

  • You can't prevent anyone from sharing the discount code on coupon websites or with friends.
  • You can't set an expiry date on the discount because it needs to work for all future subscribers.
  • It isn't easy to track the real ROI of the discount because everyone receives the same discount code.

Coupon Carrier solves these problems by monitoring your email list for new subscribers. When someone signs up, it creates a unique personal discount code in your Shopify store and delivers it to the new subscriber.

You can configure Coupon Carrier based on your preferences regarding the type of discount code, and it's value and expiry date. For example, send a 10% discount code, valid for seven days, to all new email subscribers.

How to set this up for your store

  • If you don't already offer your store visitors to sign up for your email list, you can view Mailchimp's article on how to add a popup to your website
  • Configure Coupon Carrier to deliver codes to your new subscribers.
  • Create or Modify your Mailchimp welcome email to include the merge tag, which will display the unique discount code.
  • Connect to your Shopify store and configure your discount value and expiry settings.

The first step is to sign up for a Coupon Carrier account if you haven't done that already. You can use the 7-day free trial to try our service, and once you're ready to use it in production, you can subscribe to one of our plans.

Create a Shopify connected code list

Coupon Carrier uses code lists where the unique codes are stored. You can import your own set of codes or connect to your e-commerce store if you want them to be created automatically, which is what we will do here.

In the Code List tab, create a new code list and choose to create an Autogenerated code list. Pick Shopify as the integration and connect it to your store using your credentials. Once created, you can configure your discount value and expiry settings.

Create autogenerated Shopify code list

Create a Code Email configuration to monitor your Mailchimp list

Now that we have a list of codes, we want to deliver them to our new Mailchimp subscribers. We'll use a Code Email configuration that can connect to your Mailchimp account and monitor a specific email list for new subscribers.

Create code email

When Mailchimp triggers this Code Email, a unique discount code will be created in Shopify. The next step is to deliver this code to the new subscriber. There are two different ways you can do this:

  • Let Coupon Carrier send out a customizable email with the code to the new subscriber.
  • Use an existing Mailchimp welcome automation and include the discount code using a merge tag.

This time, we'll tell Coupon Carrier to store the newly created discount code in the new subscriber's merge field and then let Mailchimp send out a welcome email where the code is included. Let's select Mailchimp as the email sender and create a new list field that we'll use to store the code in.

Select Mailchimp sender and create field

Modify your Mailchimp automation

Coupon Carrier will inspect the settings when you select an existing Mailchimp automation and let you know if any recommended changes should be made. In most cases, there are two things we need to change:

  • Add a segment condition to the automation to prevent it from being sent until the code has been added.
  • Include the merge tag in the email so that the code can be displayed.

Start by pausing your automation so that it can be modified. Add a segment condition to prevent the email from being sent until the "Coupon" field isn't blank. That way, if Coupon Carrier takes a few seconds to create and apply the code to this field, Mailchimp won't send out the email without a code in it.

Add segment condition

Next, edit the email content and include the merge tag (*|COUPON|*) in the email where you'd like the code to be shown. Remember to save and start your automation.

Add merge tag

Select the code source and activate the configuration

Switch back to Coupon Carrier, where you can finish setting up the Code Email by selecting an existing code list as the code source. You should find the code list that we created earlier. That's it, save your changes, and activate your configuration.

Select code source and activate

To test the integration, sign up for your email list, either from your website or by adding a new subscriber directly into the email list from within Mailchimp.

Coupon Carrier offers you statistics on codes delivered, used, and total order value — view reports and, if needed, export all data from the code lists.