Our Hometown Blog

It’s that time of the year again — the season of giving! If you’re looking for some simple options to offer savings to new or existing subscribers this holiday season, Our-Hometown has got you covered! Strap on your Santa boots and spread some holiday cheer with Coupon Codes and other special promotions!

Our-Hometown customers have several options for offering savings to their readers, the simplest and most effective being Coupon Codes.

You can create Coupon Codes at any time of the year by navigating to MemberPress -> Coupon Codes from your WordPress Dashboard. On this page, you’ll find any existing coupon codes listed and be able to track their usage among your subscribers. You’ll also see the “Add New” button that you can use to create a new coupon.

By default, the new coupon code will be a randomly generated string of numbers and letters, but you can edit the code to whatever you want — just don’t include any spaces or special characters! Most customers prefer to use something easy for their readers to remember. This is the code that you will eventually deliver to your readers via email newsletters, social media, print, or however you choose to advertise your promotional discount.

Under the Coupon Options, there are a few settings that need to be configured to determine how your coupon should work.

1. Discount: The discount is pretty straight forward. You can enter either a dollar amount or a percentage to be discounted.

2. Discount Mode: There are three discount modes:

• Standard – A standard discount of the amount/percentage entered above. If applied to a recurring subscription, this discount will apply to each payment made towards that subscription.
• First Payment Only – Discounts the amount/percentage entered above, but only on the First Payment of a recurring, auto-renewing membership.
• Trial Period Override – Discounts the amount/percentage entered above, but only on the Trial Period of a recurring, auto-renewing membership. (The membership does not need to have a trial period in order for this to work. The benefit of using this setting over the First Payment Only option is that you can set the amount of days that the trial period should last, whereas the first payment can only be for the normal duration of the automatically recurring subscription.)

3. Usage Count: You can enter a maximum number of uses if you want to limit this offer to the first “X” amount of people to use the code, or if you have a code that you only want to give to one specific customer.

4. Expire Coupon: If you want the Coupon to expire on a certain date, mark this box and enter the date. The coupon will no longer be valid after that date.

5. Finally, you are asked to Select Which Memberships to Apply the Coupon to. This is helpful if you want to create a coupon that only applies to a single membership type, such as Digital or Online-Only subscriptions. This also allows you to offer different discounts for different subscription types — you could offer a steeper discount to Print Subscribers or vice versa.

Check out the video above or click here for some usage examples of when to use each type of discount.

Including a coupon code inside of a URL

A handy feature of MemberPress is the ability to create a link to a membership’s registration page that will automatically apply a coupon code when the reader opens the page.

This makes promoting a special offer a little easier because you don’t necessarily need readers to even know the coupon code that they’re using — you can just create a button or graphic on your website advertising “25% off a 1 Year Digital Subscription” and the code will be activated when somebody clicks that graphic.

All you need to do is add the following to the end of a registration URL: ?coupon=COUPONCODE2022

(Replace “COUPONCODE2022” with your actual coupon code.)

A typical URL for a Membership Registration page might look like this: https://www.YOURDOMAIN.com/register/digital/digital-membership-1-year/

So the new, complete URL will be: https://www.YOURDOMAIN.com/register/digital/digital-membership-1-year/?coupon=COUPONCODE2022

If you need any help setting up a Coupon Code for your holiday promotion, reach out to our support team today by emailing ops@our-hometown.com. We’ll get you set up and ready to spread the joy!

‘Tis the season!

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