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If there’s one thing everyone loves, it’s a bargain. That feeling of having come upon a special opportunity to get exactly what you want at a price that shouldn’t be possible. It makes us feel shrewd, but it also makes us much happier about spending money when we know that we’re getting more bang for our buck, and, consequently, less buyer’s remorse.
With this in mind, there’s no good reason not to include coupon marketing in your broader marketing strategy. It’s a great way to boost sales and drive brand engagement while onboarding new customers who can provide long-term conversions. Coupon marketing also goes far beyond the scope of offering basic discounts and offers an opportunity to get truly creative with your marketing campaigns.
What is Coupon Marketing?
The fundamental principle of codes and voucher marketing involves offering customers vouchers or codes that they can submit for discounts or even outright free purchases of your products or services. Coupon marketing offers businesses a multitude of commercial benefits by helping to generate a sense of value about your offerings to drive sales. Coupon marketing is also great when integrated with social media marketing to help drive site traffic, and can even be leveraged to help you clear unwanted stock that you might otherwise have trouble selling.
The basic appeal of coupon marketing comes down to the power of the bargain, and many shoppers make a habit of searching the internet for discount codes before embarking on a purchase. Unfortunately, many businesses only offer simplistic discounts that don’t leverage the true potential of coupon marketing, so let’s look at some ways that you can maximize a coupon marketing strategy for maximum returns. Coupon marketing should be integrated as part of your best email marketing practices to help boost wider brand engagement. Just bear in mind that the size of the discounts you can offer will hinge on your profit margins and overall financial health, so make sure the discounts you offer aren’t leaving you overly exposed to loss-making practices.
Offer Coupons to New and Existing Customers
The biggest challenge for online businesses is making new customers comfortable enough to make their first purchase. After a successful initial transaction, you will have a better chance of successfully courting repeat business and can develop a long-term relationship with customers based on trust. Adding an introductory discount is a great way to get prospective new customers off the fence. You can offer these when customers either make the first purchase or open an account for the first time or just use pop-ups on your site to promote them on the page.
However, just because the first purchase has been made doesn’t mean you ought to take their custom for granted. You can also use coupon marketing to help maintain brand engagement with existing customers through monthly or yearly discount offers. This will ensure that you maintain brand visibility while ensuring an audience for any new and upcoming offerings you want to promote in the future.
Use Coupons to Leverage Season Markets
Coupon marketing is a great way to tie in your brand with public holidays and seasonal excitement, such as on Christmas sale or Labor Day sale. January sales and Black Friday are also two examples of seasonal events being utilized to drum up a frenzy of customer interest. When offering coupons in this context, it’s best to set an expiration date on your offers that matches the culmination of the holiday or seasonal event to further boost brand alignment and give your offer a sense of scarcity and “limited time only” value. Just remember that around busy retail holidays like Christmas, your competitors will be running coupon marketing campaigns of their own, so you will have to ensure that your offerings stand out from the pack.
Use Price-Minimum Coupons to Increase Your Per-Sale Averages
For most e-commerce operations, your aggregate profit margins on each purchase are what defines the health of your business. We’d all like this number to be as high as possible, and coupon marketing can aid us in this goal. When you offer customers a discount, they will frequently choose to buy more items when they feel that their money is going further.
Take advantage of this by offering discounts that only kick in after the total purchase value goes above a certain figure. This could be 10% off for purchases over $20, or even 30% off for purchases over $100. Figure out the margins for yourself and what your business can handle. You may balk at losing some of your profit margins, but a busy business is a healthy business, and you might find people will impulse-spend on bigger purchases when they feel they’re getting a bargain than they otherwise would have.
Push DeadStock With “BOGOF” Offers
Ideally, you want all your merchandise to prove uniformly popular with audiences, but, unfortunately, not all goods and services were created equal. Products that underperform can leave you with a bloated inventory full of products that are costing you money just to store as their value depreciates over time. This is where coupons, and particularly “buy one, get one free” (BOGOF) offers can prove invaluable.
You can kill two birds with one stone by bundling up your less popular stock with higher selling items. Not only does this help you shift deadweight, but it also enhances the appeal of your hotter items that may be netting your business its biggest profit margins. Of course, you probably won’t be getting the same returns as if someone had bought both items separately, but you need to play to your strengths in the marketplace to ensure that you’re still coming out on top overall.
Conclusion
The appeal of the bargain is the engine that drives coupon marketing, but there’s so much more you can do with the medium than just offering a simple discount. With the right tweaks, coupon marketing can enhance the appeal of all your offerings to drive sales and onboard new customers. Online shopping has never been a more crowded marketplace, so you need to give customers a reason to pick you over the competition. Coupon marketing can provide those compelling reasons, and let you sacrifice a little profit today to ensure prosperity in the long-term future.
