“Unique discount codes are an essential part of rewarding your customers as part of a loyalty strategy, or as part of an effective loyalty program. When using unique discount codes, merchants are able to foster a sense of exclusivity and appreciation with the customer that generic codes can't provide—they feel like their loyalty is being uniquely rewarded.”
The top use cases: seasonal, affiliate, and lifecycle
Eleven primary use cases for unique codes emerged from our analysis: Seasonal discounts are the most popular of all, accounting for 32% of discount sets and more than twice the number of affiliate use cases.
31.7%
Seasonal discounts: for seasonal or monthly promotions
15.11%
Affiliate: shared by partners or influencers
12.03%
Marketing lifecycle: for customer journey touchpoints, such as welcoming new subscribers, winback, post purchase, and abandonment
10.56%
Employee/friends/student: perks for internal teams or other groups
9.49%
Loyalty: for loyalty program members or customers who provide reviews
7.81%
Customer service: used by support teams to resolve issues
6.63%
Holiday: campaigns tied to major holidays, shopping events (i.e., BFCM), cultural celebrations, and birthdays/anniversaries
4.65%
Gift: a thank you, giveaway, surprise reward, or prize redemption
1.13%
Event: for in-person or virtual event attendees/registrants
0.61%
Bundle: for purchasing specific product combinations
0.28%
Flash sales: short-term offers for creating urgency
Shopify Plus stores are much more likely than merchants who are not on the Shopify Plus platform plan to create a unique code set for every common use case.
Affiliate marketing
makes up 15% of all identifiable use cases, with 33% of Plus stores using them– compared to just 16% of non-Plus shops. This is no surprise: brands want accurate affiliate attribution to understand what's working.
Marketing lifecycle campaigns
accounts for 12% of use cases, with 30% of Plus stores using them versus 15% of non-Plus. New subscriber and winback are most popular, followed by post-purchase. Checkout, abandonment, prospecting are underused.
Insider discounts (employee/friends/student)
represents the largest usage difference between Plus brands (28%) and non-Plus (10%). Employee and student/teacher discounts are most common.
Customer service
employed by 23% of Plus brands compared to only 7% of non-Plus. Turn sub-par brand experiences into loyal customers with personalized codes that can't leak.
Loyalty
embraced by Plus (30%) and non-Plus (17%) to recognize loyalty, whether rewarding feedback or encouraging referrals.
“Unique codes have been instrumental in driving customer engagement for us. We use them as part of a referral program which has driven a 219% increase in sales through word-of-mouth & customer advocacy.”
Brands have two favorite discount types
When brands issue unique discount codes, they overwhelmingly stick to two types that are simple to understand: percentage off and dollar-amount off.
Together, they account for more than 96% of all discount sets in the dataset.
Free shipping is often set up as an automatic cart rule triggered when the order hits a minimum threshold; so, it is not popular for unique codes.
The most popular discount percentage is 20%
When using percentage off as the discount value, the favorite is 20%. It’s used about 17% more often than the second popular discount, 10% off.
Studies show that discounts need to be meaningful enough to motivate, but not so steep as to undermine trust or profitability.
Brands often settle on 20% because it’s a familiar sweet spot that retains margins.
How to make the most of unique discount codes
Our data reveals clear opportunities for all Shopify brands to approach discounting more mindfully.
Get started with discounts
Follow the example of Plus merchants who use unique codes more. Grow revenue without devaluing your brand or making guesses about attribution with unique discount codes.
Use unique codes in your promotions year‑round. Go beyond Black Friday Cyber Monday or popular holidays. Try affiliate and lifecycle marketing.
Scale your discount strategy
Expand your use of unique discounts. Consider often overlooked use cases like affiliate marketing, insider discounts, and customer service.
Revisit how you use unique codes in lifecycle marketing. Add unique codes to communications across customer stages. Include winback, post purchase, abandonment, and prospecting.
Becky Chambers VP of Lifecycle + Retention at Caddis
“Unique codes allow us to be highly strategic, targeted, and more efficient with our promo strategy.”
Create unique discount code sets with Bulk Discount Code Bot
Seguno’s Bulk Discount Code Bot generates unlimited unique coupon codes that stop coupon abuse, improve attribution, and drive revenue. Create codes right in Shopify, then export them to your marketing channel of choice.
Generate unlimited unique codes in minutes
Track redemptions, revenue, and AOV
Assign prefixes, campaign, and channel for easy tracking and readability
Bonus report: the impact of discount codes in email marketing
Do discount codes make a difference in customer engagement and sales? Does it matter if they’re generic codes or unique codes? To answer that question, we analyzed tens of thousands of emails sent with Seguno.
Here’s some of what we found:
Emails with unique discount codes consistently outperform generic discount codes
Unique discount codes are especially effective immediately before the BFCM rush
Resending a discount code once can lift revenue by up to 25%