8 Tips for Successful Coupon Marketing

---

How to Offer a Downloadable Coupon to Your Online Audience

Do you remember the days where the only place you could find a coupon was in the newspaper or through a direct mail campaign?

Well times have changed and marketers have discovered that social media is a great place to offer a coupon to their audience.

68% of consumers are using social media to find their coupon deals.

Not only does social media allow you to reach a wider audience with your coupon marketing, but using a marketing Campaign through a software like ShortStack.com makes it so your coupon is easily downloadable via smartphone, desktop or tablet. And in case you were curious, marketing reports predict that 68% of consumers are using social media to find their coupon deals.

Before you jump into coupon marketing you should research what your audience expects from a digital coupon.

This can be done multiple ways, via surveying your audience or doing a little market research.

We’ll take the hassle out of the latter one for you and here are some stats to think about when planning your coupon marketing.

• 70% of people want coupons for products they normally buy
• Shoppers use, on average, 5.8 methods to discover/acquire coupons

• Coupons influence purchasing decisions more than sales
• Receiving a coupon makes customers feel like a winner

So, are you ready to make your audience feel like winners?

Here are 8 tips for successful coupon marketing!

1. Use a Campaign: When offering a coupon to your audience, use a Facebook app or marketing Campaign in order to host your coupon. Using a Campaign will help you track the traffic you get to your coupon, as well as provides an opportunity to collect an email address from those people who will be downloading your coupon.

2. Consider collecting more data: It’s always a good idea to gate any of your content that you give away. Gating refers to requiring that your audience provides you with something (an email, phone number, address, feedback) in order to receive a valuable resource from you. Coupons are likely to drive a lot of downloads so it’s a great opportunity to grow your email list.

If you’re not interested in growing your list, you could include a simple form asking people if they’ve used your product before or not. This will provide you with insight into whether the majority of your coupon downloads are coming from existing or new clients.

3. Integrate with email: 70% of consumers want their coupons emailed to them. Once coupons are emailed, businesses see a 14% increase in open rate, a34% increase in unique clicks and a 48% increase in revenue per email sent.

Remember our last tip about collecting more data? Once you have someone’s email address you can regularly update them on specials and discounts that you’re running, resulting in a return customer.

4. Make your coupon easily downloadable: When you use ShortStack.com there are a variety of ways that you can display a coupon. You can use the Action Widget and have the coupon pop-up after someone fills out a form, you can include a download button and have your audience automatically download their coupon, or you can have the coupon appear without requiring any information (like today’s example).

5. Don’t leave out your mobile users: Marketing reports predict that 96% of consumers will use their smartphone in order to search for a digital coupon in 2015.  Unfortunately, only 44.5% of marketers will utilize digital coupons as part of their strategy by the year 2016.

Want to hear the good news? When you use ShortStack.com to run your coupon offer, it is automatically mobile friendly so that your mobile and desktop users can access your coupon.

6. Include your coupon conditions: If people can abuse a good deal, they most likely will! Make sure you include your coupon conditions such as number of times it can be used, the dates it’s valid and any other legal restrictions you need on your coupon.

7. Promote across all of your channels: Unless you’re wanting to offer an exclusive coupon (which is a great idea if you’re wanting to run a social network-specific promotion) you’ll want to use all of your marketing channels to promote your coupon. We also recommend using a landing page versus Facebook to host your coupon. This will assure that all users can access and download your coupon whether they’re on Facebook or not. (Yes there are actually people who are not on Facebook!)

8. Find your discount “sweet spot”: A while back we had a guest post from a woman who managed to grow her email list by a few hundred people overnight. One of her strategies was by offering a 40% discount off her product to everyone who entered her promotion. Although this was a steep discount she figured the payoff would be worth it. Here’s what she learned:

The discount I included was for 40 percent off. I might have only given 10 percent or 15 percent off to any other email list to first test the response for a smaller discount (the smaller the better, right?) but this list was different.

I knew that the people I was emailing were people who like free stuff and heavily discounted stuff (that’s why they browse giveaway listing sites).

The funny thing is my open rate was still really low even though my subject line advertised the steep discount.

It occurred to me that such a deep discount much actually make it look like my candles were cheap and low-quality – which is not the case at all.

In fact at a 40 percent discount I would have been taking a pretty steep hit, but because my candles are so amazing I’m pretty sure the Lifetime Value of a customer will be high so taking a hit on the first order is okay. I expect most people to be repeat purchasers (maybe I’m a little too cocky but my candles are awesome).

I ended up changing the discount to only 20 percent and low and behold my open rate actually increased!

This just goes to show that there is a delicate balance between what you can offer as a discount and how it affects the perceived quality of your product. Basically: don’t sell yourself short… even when dealing with people who love a free/discounted product!

Example of a Downloadable Coupon Offer

Earth Choice Fabric Softener is an organic softener sold by Nature’s Organics. Their coupon offer is available to download without requiring an email address or additional information. Once you click the “Click Here to Download” button the coupon automatically loads so that you can print it out straight from your computer or have it scanned using your mobile device.

To view the original article Click Here