As a business owner, you may have come across coupon marketing strategy. A sophisticated marketing tool, coupons can not only drive up the sales but can also create an unprecedented brand image and customer loyalty.
However, before you start planning a coupon marketing strategy it is important to know, whether your business actually needs one. Almost any business can benefit from coupons irrespective of its type and size, but a well-planned strategy is inevitable. According to your current budget and marketing goals, work on a coupon marketing strategy that will ensure success.
How to start with coupon marketing?
After you have decided that your business needs coupon strategy, its time to choose a coupon partner and start planning. You will start with a small campaign with diversified parameters such as discounted products, discount type and value and duration. Now for any coupon strategy to success, it is vital to track the performance of every single coupon and campaign and improve your strategy accordingly. There is no definite way to ensure success than experimenting and learning which strategy works best for you.
Running smaller campaigns will help you learn what works best for you. If you have a small business then probably running 5-8 coupon campaigns will be enough to know what works best for you. Now let's take a closer look at what attributes of a coupon make it effective so that you can create personalized coupon campaigns in no time.
Creating coupons that work
Design for attraction-people always buy with their eyes, and if you a coupon design is attractive enough to catch eyes, then its definitely going to be a success. No spelling mistakes or poor graphics are allowed. If you have that creative bone in you, then good enough, else hire a professional designer for the job and get customizable coupons designed for your campaign.
Clear and concise-coupons are exactly like a telegram. They need to be clear and concise. Less is more with coupons and you need to keep the content minimal with no complicated promotion rules or too much text to read.
Expiration date-all your coupons must have an expiry date. This will make them attractive to customers as it is proven that consumers find limited period promotions far more appealing. This is why your coupons must have an expiry date.
Call to Action-also known as CTA, this is the tempting message that customers click to avail the offer your coupon is promoting. You have to be creative here and rather than going with generic 'shop now' CTA, find something innovative like
- "Start saving now"
- "Reveal today's hot prices"
- "Claim your deal"
Well maybe ours are not that creative, but you get the gist.
Track-able code-as mentioned before, the only way to ensure that your coupon strategy is a success is to make it trackable. This is why you need to have a coupon system in place that allows you to track your coupon campaigns through the entire lifecycle. There's a study that suggests that 77% of shoppers agree that their buying behavior is affected by the discounts available.
This is why you need to personalize offers for your customers and that can only happen when you have specific information about their choices, spending behaviors or favorite brands. With proper coupon campaign tracking, you can get the data.
A work about coupon personalization
Personalization is nothing short of revolutionizing concept in marketing that has made it possible for brands and businesses to nurture loyalty and boost sales. However, the more recent development of how critical online privacy is for modern consumers, using personalization in coupon strategy is thin ice that needs to be tread upon lightly.
You will be using personal information to create personalized coupons for your consumers and there's no going around it, but you can ensure a proper balance between the "loss" of privacy and the benefits your customers get in exchange. As 43% of consumers agree that they would be willing to exchange their personal information with companies for personalized promotions to save move with discounts.
Another word of advice is to invest in a coupon system that allows automatic coupon personalization as manual personalization of every coupon campaign is not practically possible.
How to Promote Your Coupons Online?
Now you know about how to get started with a coupon strategy and create & personalize coupons, it's time to know about platforms that allow you to promote coupons online. This part is important because targeting the right customers and presenting them with relevant coupons decides whether your coupon strategy is a success or not.
There are a number of channels you can utilize to promote coupons online. Best of these are:
Websites like GreatBuyz and Groupon allow you to reach customers who are still not aware of your brand but look for products that you offer. Such platforms give you an opportunity to compete with the giants in your category and win new acquisitions.
If you are an Indian brand or business, GreatBuyz offers you an opportunity to reach millions of its users with your coupon promotion. The site offers a dedicated platform for brands to add, modify or delete coupons in real-time. Also, there is a service that allows customers to directly follow your brand and receive relevant promotions and offers directly in their inbox called GreatBuyz Streamz.
Email marketing has been integrated into coupon promotion for long now. However, by combining email and coupon marketing you can create most personalized promotion campaigns ever. Start working on creating an email list that you can use to promote your brand.
A quick tip here is to always inform your visitors about the frequency of the promotional emails and how they can quit the subscription. This way you are should respect their privacy which will make more people to share their data with you.
This is all you need to know to begin with your first coupon strategy and ensure it is a success resulting in more sales and conversions.