Tips That Can Help Businesses Improve Their Coupon Marketing Strategy

In 1888, Coca-Cola first offered a coupon to its customers. Since then, coupons have become popular and a massive marketing strategy. Customers prefer to purchase products for which they are offered a discount at the time of purchase. Many online stores offer coupons to customers, thereby enhancing their sales rate. Coupon marketing is widely used and is a massive opportunity for businesses. 

Coupon marketing is a business strategy that helps companies attract, engage, and reward clients. Moreover, it allows businesses to give their customers a better experience. Also, it is helpful in customer relationship management strategies to maintain a better and long-term relationship with the customer.

Stats about coupon marketing:

Customers often look for discounts before making any purchases. Here is what the statistics have to say about coupon marketing.

• 60% of customers said that they prefer to buy when they are getting a discount; 50% are more likely to visit a store if they have received one. 
• 59% of customer state that they prefer digital coupons. 
• 95% of customers used coupons at least once a year.
• In 2020, Slickdeals become one of the most visited US coupon sites.
• During COVID-19, household items were the most searched coupon category.
• The total value of distributed consumer packaged goods coupons is about $470 billion.
• 94% of millennials prefer shopping using coupons.
• One-fourth of consumers avoid shopping online when they do not have coupons.
• 90% of people said that coupons helped them save a lot of money.

Coupon Marketing Strategies

Coupon marketing is simple to understand. Businesses give vouchers or codes that customers can redeem in exchange for discounts and free items. This strategy helps businesses in many ways, such as:

• Help them drive more sales by making attractive offers.
• Get you more customers and traffic.
• Clear out unwanted product stock.

Strategies that help businesses enhance their sales using coupon marketing

There are many factors responsible that decide how big discount you can offer to the customers. These factors involve profit margin, how fast you want to make sales, and more. 

• Coupons for first-time buyers: Convincing customers to buy products is one of the hardest tasks for any business. Once customers buy a product, you can build a trustworthy relationship with your customers. A common way to get customers is by offering them discounts.
   
•  Exciting coupons during festivals: Customers are often looking for exciting offers during festivals. It is a perfect time for businesses to grab the attention of customers by offering them exciting deals using a coupon marketing strategy.
   
• Use price-minimum coupons: If businesses want to increase their sales, coupon marketing is the best way out. It is seen that when there is any discount involved, people often tend to buy more products. Moreover, businesses can benefit from coupons that are activated only over a specific monetary amount.
   
• Give buy one, get one offer: Sometimes, businesses run into a situation where specific items do not perform well. Such items ended taking up a lot of space and are a headache for businesses. So, what is the solution? A practical solution to this issue is to offer coupons. By doing so, you can mark your high-margin products and sell unwanted products.
   

Tips to improve coupon marketing

The one thing that businesses must know about customers is that 90% of customers buy and use coupons. Hence, here are a few tips that can help you improve coupon marketing. 

Understand coupon marketing: Coupons are helping customers buy products at a less price. Offering discounts will not only help businesses get more sales. Customers tend to buy more when they are offered better discounts. It helps businesses improve customer loyalty.

Know the benefits of coupon marketing: There are a lot of benefits of coupon marketing that help businesses understand why they must use coupon marketing for their business. 

• Accomplish sales goals faster 
• Grow customer base
• Beat the competition
• Track your success rate
   

Accept the downfalls of coupon marketing: Everything comes with some advantages and disadvantages. The same goes for coupon marketing. Offering many coupons can make your brand look cheap, damaging your reputation, increasing on-time buyers, enhance shopping cart abandonment, and risking your bottom line.
 

Traditional vs Digital Coupon Type: Understanding the traditional and digital coupon types and knowing what strategy will suit your business is crucial. After Covid-19, people prefer shopping online and using digital coupon types. So, it is wise for businesses to choose the coupon type wisely. Also, you can prefer using both offline and online modes, respectively.
 

Discount codes should fit the business: Before distributing coupons, know the concept behind coupon marketing first. Discount do attract customers, but it does not always apply to every market. Before applying discount offers, ensure that it does fit your brand image. Sometimes, brands do not offer coupons because of their high-end image. Hence, your businesses should analyze themselves, their sales, and other relevant data:

• The most minor and most profitable products
• The best-selling products
• Rate of cart abandonment
• Loyal customers and their favorite product
• One-time purchasers
   

Divide audience into segments: Each customer has a unique set of tastes, and launching discount coupons can sometimes only target specific customers. Here is when the division of the audience into segments become necessary. Instead of offering the same coupon to all the customers, it is wise to offer coupons based on geographical region, customer’s choice, and more. But how does a business decision that? By answering the following questions, you can ask yourselves a few questions such as:

What is their passion? Or Which city are they from? Or What exactly do they buy? Or How old are they? Or What is their gender?
 

Discount Marketing: Businesses must determine where to give discounts and which platform to choose. There are a lot of platforms that ensure the coupons are reaching potential customers. 

A few of them are:

• Email Marketing 
• Social Media
• Newspaper/magazine 

These platforms help your customers use coupons, and some of these platforms, such as email marketing allow customers to share their coupons with others. Similarly, social media is considered the most effective platform when it comes to marketing. It is also one of the most widely used platforms.
 

Plan out the deals: It is hard to get to the endpoint without having definite business goals. Hence, knowing what you are trying to achieve by offering business coupons is crucial. To do so, the business can write down its goals and strategies. Following is the list that can help you understand why the business needs coupons:

• Clear stock
• Enhance sales
• Boost conversion rate
• Know the clients
• Encourage customers to buy more
• Boost the brand’s image
• Attract your competitor's market
• Reduce the number of abandoned shopping carts
   

Monitor your coupon: Make sure that you track progress from the beginning and know your sales. Monitoring helps you boost sales and get a hold of your customers. Here are a few steps that can help you analyze how successful your campaign is:

• Keep track of your discount 
• Track your substantial profits 
• Check your sales
• Study the demographics of the customers
   

Coupon personalization: This is one of the most effective coupon marketing strategies. In this, customers reveal their personal information and get discount coupons. To achieve this, the brand must be intimate with the customers. Here are a few examples of data that can be collected from the customers:

• Relationship status 
• Status of employment
• Revenue and location
• Age and gender
• history of purchase
• Preferences for products or services
• Birthdays, anniversaries, and other details.

Upon receiving the required customer information, you can create customized coupons. As a result, you can attract more and more customers and get a competitive edge over your competition.
 

In conclusion:

Managing business and sales is not an easy task. Coupon marketing provides businesses with more opportunities to enhance their sales using coupons in more creative ways. If a business follows the right approach, coupons can empower your businesses and help them meet their business goals using new methods anytime. 

These days, it is crucial to drive business growth, and coupon marketing offers perfect help to companies. If you own a business, regardless of the size, leverage the benefits of jiWebTech’s Advertising solutions and help your business get a hold of your potential customers.