Toni from ICG wrote a post how to create simple A/B split testing for offline promotions for online store. Now we will show you how to manage coupon codes trough Magento and prepare for your next “offline” campaign.

Under Magento administration, first go to System -> Configuration -> Customer -> Promotions and create initial settings which will be used later for generating coupon codes, this can be changed later on creating new Shopping Cart Price Rules. Consider this as a starting template.

Basic Settings

Now we will create new Shopping Cart Price Rules using Toni’s idea.

Lets say you’re giving a 10% discount to customers that buy your products in December using a code for example “December10?. Lets include different promo codes in catalog version A and version B. So the A would have a promo code “December10a” and B would have “December10b”.

To build on his idea, lets say we wanna track every catalog individually, how would we do that?

Go to Promotions -> Shopping Cart Price Rules -> Add New Rule.

Now we will use Specific Coupon -> Use Auto Generation.

Hit Save and Continue Edit, now under Conditions we will leaved blank to apply on all products, now under Actions, we will give 10% of product price discount.

Now we need to generate Coupon Codes. Go to Manage Coupon Codes. There is few basic settings, Coupon quantity, code format etc. After we have made desired adjustments, hit Generate button.

Now we have list of 20 unique coupon codes, which we can export to CSV or Excel XML format. Each coupon code we can use on Catalog version A and Catalog version B.

Ok, we will use one coupon code to create test order and see how it will apply on shopping cart.

Now we will create report regarding to this promotion. Reports -> Sales -> Coupons -> and now we can create custom report regarding to coupon usage.

There are numerous way to engage potential customers using custom generated codes. For example you are going to business meeting and you  simply print 20 flyers with unique coupon codes and spread out as a gift after successful  meeting :-).