Coupons are an awesome sales tool. Not just they help retain existing customers, they aid attracting new customers as well.
Businesses of all sizes and types can use coupons to encourage their sales.
Coupons can ‘pull in business.’ For this reason, they have gained immense popularity among marketing managers and business promotion strategies.
According to research, 95% of customers love coupons and prefer shopping through them. The best part of coupon marketing is that its easy to follow and can help you get a steady stream of customers and qualified sales lead.
If this entire idea seems impressive to you, read this post to know all good that coupon marketing can bring to your business!
What is a coupon in business?
A coupon can be a ticket or document that customers can redeem for a rebate or financial discount when buying a product.
Mostly, the manufacturer of the product or a retailer issues a coupon as a part of sales promotion, to be used in retail outlets.
Customers can get coupons directly from the manufacturer, or from other places like:
- Internet Printables
- Directly on products
- Magazines
- Newspapers
- From the manufacturer
- Buy coupons online
- Blinkies or tear-pads
What exactly is coupon marketing?
When you promote your business through ways of coupons, then this is known as coupon marketing.
Every person loves a special discount, be it an offer, something for free or a value-addition scheme. We all love getting extra stuff without paying for it. This makes us feel a little bit special and develops the notion of ‘saving money.’
For this reason, coupons and vouchers are an excellent way to build loyalty within the existing customer base or to gain the attention of the new customers.
Now, why coupon marketing is so great and essential for your business? Find it out through the following facts.
Important Facts about Coupon Marketing:
1. Coupons are highly impactful and influential:
Coupons are almost similar to word-of-mouth publicity when it is about influencing customer buying decisions. Coupons carry the power as they are written offers that no one can deny.
They are as trusted by customers as recommendations from their friends. With a coupon, business marketers can combat numerous marketing challenges with ease.
2. Coupon marketing is measurable:
As a business marketer, it would be difficult for you to measure the success of most of your marketing strategies. But with coupon marketing, this is not the case.
You can track coupons by redemption location and redemption rate. It gives you important insights to your customers and helps you justify your marketing budget.
With advanced coupon technique, it is even possible to fetch customer data that can be used for future marketing strategies.
3. Coupons can help increase initial traction:
The biggest challenge of a new business is to fetch customers on an initial basis. Things can be more difficult if the product is absolutely new. Coupons are an excellent solution in this situation.
Customers would like to get and use the product if they get the same quality at a much lower price or for free. You can use coupons to increase initial traction rate of customers to your new business.
4. Coupons connect faster to customers:
Advertised promotions are forgotten right when they lose sight, but a coupon travels along with the customer in the wallet, purse, and even at home.
With all your important business information printed on it, more customers will remember you through the coupon. And if your coupon offers them extremely great value, then be prepared to enjoy high sales rate for the next few months!
5. Coupons allow a one-to-one moment:
The ads on TV, radio, print, and other forms simply advertise your business and product. However, coupons offer a distraction-free, private communication moment to the customers.
A coupon offers the opportunity to establish a business brand, share information, and invite readers to join a club or membership, and more other activities.
6. Coupons have a wider reach:
Discount and free offers impress not just the lower income groups but also the affluent customers. People of every income group intend to save money, despite their salary group.
Coupons are used by customers of all income groups. You can, therefore, widen your business reach easily with coupon marketing.
Benefits of Coupon Marketing:
Coupon marketing can be really beneficial for your business. Some of the important benefits of coupon marketing for your business are:
1. Expand Your Operational Area:
Coupons are an excellent way to expand your business operations to different areas. If used wisely then it can have a great impact to expand or increase the market area to as many customers as possible.
If your coupons offer great value to the customers, then they would not mind travel significant distances to redeem the coupon and avail great discount.
2. Encourage New Customers to Try Your Business:
According to the latest research, 45% of customers are ready to wait for a product to purchase it at a discounted price before they buy it otherwise.
Coupons are a great tool to put items on sale. You can use coupons to entice new customers with great offers and discounts. This is an excellent way to attract more customers to your business.
3. Retain Old Customers:
A business is able to succeed and perform for longer years if it has a great pool of loyal customers. If you have 15% of loyal customers, then what about the remaining 85%! Have you ever thought where this 85% goes?
You can retain them with coupons. Use coupons to attract old customers back to your store.
4. Increase Sales of your products:
Your store must be having some products, which are not sold. There might also be some products in your store that have very less sale. What can you do about such products?
With coupons, you can increase sales of unsold or less sold products. You can offer coupons to let customers purchase two items at a discounted rate. This will help you drive the margin to a great extent!
Avoid These Risks of Coupon Marketing:
You can use coupons to upsurge your business sales. According to many retailers, coupon marketing has helped them to build great revenue.
But if you are not earning any profit then using this marketing technique can be a waste. This can happen if you follow an improperly planned campaign.
So, check here some of the risks of coupon marketing that you must avoid.
1. Using Coupon Marketing to Increase Sales:
Using coupon marketing to boost only your business sales can be your big mistake. Coupons are excellent to focus on building your business brand.
You can add value to your service and enhance the customer experience in the store through the way of coupons.
Otherwise, you would always be competing on low prices offered by other big brands like WalMart and Amazon.
2. Using Coupons Too Often:
Using coupons is an excellent way to attract customers. But using them too often can be a big loss to your business.
It is because if you use coupons regularly, then your customers would wait for them and would avoid buying your products otherwise. They would wait till the next coupon is announced.
Hence, make sure you practice extreme couponing to know how you can use the coupons effectively.
3. Selling Products at Discounted Rates Only:
If you keep announcing the coupons and sell your products at discounted merchandise, then you are not able to make the most of your coupon marketing.
Doing this will not be able to drive traffic to your store, and if customers come they would always expect a discount or offer scheme.
Tips to Use Coupon Marketing to Promote Your Business:
1. Determining the Target Customer Market:
Your coupon marketing strategy can succeed when it resonates with the target audience. For this, you first have to determine the target customer market with the coupon campaign.
Do you wish to target new customers?
Do you intend to attract existing customers to your business?
If you want to target new customers, you have to offer something beyond what your competitors are providing. Customers switch between brands only if they are better and discounted.
Contrary, if you wish to target existing customers, you have to analyze their buying pattern and market behavior. Accordingly, you have to introduce coupons that match their purchasing habits.
You can tailor the coupon marketing to suit the buying habits of your target audience. This will give an instant boost to your sales. Don’t let the customers leave once they redeem the coupon. Offer them follow-ups to keep them interested in your products and business.
2. Decide What You Need to Offer:
The buying preferences would vary from customers to customers. Offering them coupons according to their preferences makes sense. But make sure you don’t multiply the options. This can easily lead to a big confusion. It can hamper the success of your overall coupon campaign.
You have to be cautious while selecting the best types of coupons to target the audiences. Be careful while selecting coupons for the campaign. Make sure that the coupons you select are aligned with the purchasing preferences of your target audience.
3. Select the Area Where You Want to market the coupons:
When you are aware of who to target, then it becomes easier to decide what to offer through the coupon campaign.
But there is another big question!
How can you maximize your coupons reach to different customers and boundaries?
The best solution to maximize the reach of your coupons is by publishing them online in coupon directories.
Here’s why!
Most of the customers visit online directories to find discount coupons before they make a purchase.
When you publish coupons in online coupon directories, this will help you connect well to the potential buyers who are searching discount deals for services you are offering.
Additionally, it is great to promote your coupons on social media channels and integrate them into your email marketing campaign.
Why?
Because a large of a number of buyers check social platform to avail discounts and identify coupons with offers. They even share such coupons with their friends, family, and peers.
4. Give a Solid Offer:
Your coupon can be a discount, bonus, premium, or free information. Make sure the information is solid enough to influence the buyer’s decision.
Most importantly, make sure that the offer, as well as content of your coupon, is easily readable.
You can use photographs, lines or illustrations to enhance the appearance of your coupon. But at the same time, such aspects must be informative and readable.
5. Offer Discounts on First Come Basis:
You can limit the discount scheme by offering early bird discounts. This implies to offer a discount on a first come basis.
Not only does this boost potential leads to make a feasible buying decision, but it also enables you to obtain increased cash inflow and better management of available resources.
This marketing technique can help you plan your events and get a high rate of initial traction in the quest to avail the discount offer.
6. Analyze Your Coupon’s Performance:
The above points have told you the correct way to launch a coupon marketing process successfully. It is but important to analyze the performance of your campaign. This is essential to know if it is working properly or not.
How can you do this?
As a very first step, analyze the traffic volume on your landing pages. It will let you know that the coupon marketing is able to attract customers from affiliate sites or not.
Next, monitor your buyers to know how much has actually purchased products using your coupons. Make sure you don’t make any false assumptions, which can make you move in the wrong direction.
Monitor all other channels one by one and keep a record of noteworthy data. This way, you would avoid any possibilities of randomness.
Final Words:
So this is all about coupon marketing and how you can use it to increase conversions. Just optimize your coupon marketing strategy for most of the platforms to widen your reach and attract more customers to your offer.