Our Blog

In my line of business, I sign up for a *lot* of email newsletters.  Most of my subscriptions aren't necessarily based on an affinity for the brand, but rather a desire to stay in touch with how other companies--beyond Delivra's clients--are using email.

One observation I've made is that (in my inbox, at least) the bulk of email I receive from retailers is aimed at driving traffic to their e-commerce websites.  But brick-and-mortar retailers can use email as a way to motivate shoppers to visit their physical stores.   In fact, we recently added a feature to our HTML editor to allow retailers or retail brands to create their own scannable coupons that email recipients can print and use.

Our Creative Services team has been using our new Barcode Editor to insert barcode images into mailings they've designed for a regional retail chain in the New England and Mid-Atlantic states.   We're now pleased to offer this capability to all of our Professional and Enterprise clients, available by request to your Delivra Account Manager.

Partial screenshot of Barcode Editor

The Barcode Editor supports the most popular barcode formats supported by retail point-of-sale systems, including UPC, Code 128, and Code 39 (also called "3 of 9").  Designers can control the size of the barcode image, as well as the message to be encoded.   Barcodes are inserted into mailings as JPEG or PNG images, and can be oriented vertically or horizontally with respect to the mailing content.

If you choose to send barcoded coupons to your subscribers via email, keep in mind the following tips:

1. Before sending, test your barcodes by printing the email and scanning the barcode with actual equipment used at point of sale.   Without going into too much technical detail, let's just say that not all scanners can read all formats or dimensions of barcodes.
2. Be careful about the offers you send.  A Midwest grocery chain recently found itself in hot water with shoppers after it pulled the plug on an Internet coupon offer that proved too popular and was becoming too costly.  The coupon, for $10 off a purchase of $10 or more, amounted to a giveaway of free money, with the company realizing no benefit.  Once a coupon is published on the Internet, assume that it will be forwarded and multiple copies printed.  Consider using a "percent off" offer, or one requiring a higher minimum purchase amount, to limit your financial risk.
3. The "text" of your barcode--the letters and numbers it represents--can be dynamic.  You could load a unique coupon code for each recipient into a Delivra demographics field such as Text2_, and use a merge tag (%%Text2_%%) as the text to encode in your barcode.  When the mailing is sent, a unique barcode will then be generated for each recipient.  If your point-of-sale system supports it, this would give you a way to track which recipients' coupons were actually used, or to limit each unique coupon code to a single use.

Interested in learning more or getting started with bar codes in your emails?  Contact your Delivra Account Manager today!

Chris Broshears | Product Development