New Customer Discount: An Email Hack

I generally don't advocate for anything 'dirty' when it comes to trying to using hacks for the Discount game.  In fact, that's a general POV on life for me:  be a decent person and do decent things.

With that said, there is an email hack that is simple, effective-and incredibly common.  So common, that when I was working in eCommerce, if I had a dollar for every time I saw this happen, I would be rich!  And, while it was a bit annoying (mainly from a customer data management perspective), I never once thought-even as a professional-that this hack was dirty.  If anything, I thought:  fair play on you for figuring it out.

So, here you go!

We've all been on the websites where, if you sign up with your email -as a new customer-you will get some $ or % off your first order.  This functionality is eCommerce 101, and is easy peasy for any customer to do, right?  Well, here's the hack.  To my knowledge, this only works with Gmail (so, if you're still holding onto your AOL account...now is the time to get a new email!).  

If you want to continue to take advantage of the loophole with Gmail, whenever you sign up for the first purchase discount-after you've already signed up once with your regular Gmail, you can continue to sign up for the discount by simply adding '+X' (where X is a number) to the email before the '@gmail.com' in whatever pop up or form on the website is offering you the discount for signing up.

Example:  Your 'regular' Gmail address is:  blah@gmail.com.   You've signed up on a website and received your new customer discount previously with that email.  BUT, if you then sign up as blah+1@gmail.com (or blah+34@gmail.com or blah+5@gmail.com or...), the customer data/email technology sees this as a net-new email address, whereas to Gmail, it's the same email.    If you were to use blah+1@gmail.com, you will still get emails to your blah@gmail.com inbox.  Nifty, huh?

The only way I've seen this hack being addressed is that many companies now have technology (thru the website cookie) that recognizes you as a previous visitor-and won't show the popup for you to then play the game.  Companies haven't done this to stop people from using this hack-but rather are trying to improve the shopping experience by not asking someone for an email who has already provided it.

...and of course there is a hack for this. ;)  If you've already provided your email once-and aren't seeing the pop up any longer when you want to shop again...go incognito on your browser.  Doing so will mean that your computer won't be cookie-d, and you should then see the pop up again to sign up with your +X@gmail.com for another discount!

I love it when a discount hack is this fricking easy. :)  In fact, this might be my favorite.  What about you-what is your favorite (or go-to) easy discount hack?  Drop a line in the comments and let me know!