A Complete Guide on Creating a Successful Digital Coupon Marketing Strategy

We’ll go over the advantages and disadvantages of digital coupon campaigns in this article. We’ll go over how to create a coupon marketing strategy, how to establish campaign goals, how to target and customize your coupon promotions, and how to publicize and distribute your coupons. You’ll also learn how to create and run discount ads, as well as how to track and optimize your coupon campaigns. Finally, we’ll provide you with some ideas for your next coupon campaign.

Defining Coupon Marketing

Coupon marketing is the practice of using coupon codes, vouchers, and discounts to attract and keep customers by capitalizing on their desire to save money on purchases.

Coupons can be public codes (BLACKFRIDAY) that are available to a defined target audience or personalized, one-of-a-kind coupon codes (valentines19503) that are allocated to specific customers. They can be transmitted in a variety of ways, both online and offline (code, barcode, QR). They’re suitable for both B2B and B2C marketing. Coupons can also be personalized or have unique redemption criteria that govern the conditions under which they can be redeemed. Coupons are a powerful marketing tool that may be employed at any point in the customer’s journey.

Why go for Digital Coupon Marketing?

Coupons have evolved into sophisticated marketing tools that help to promote brand image and client loyalty while also driving sales. Coupon campaigns can also be utilized as a source of tracking data for CRM, which can be used to grow and improve your marketing efforts in general if you use a modern infrastructure. Let’s take a look at some data that demonstrate how widespread coupon utilization has become:

• 90% of customers use digital coupons
• In the second quarter of 2020, digital coupon redemption in the United States surpassed that of paper coupons for the first time.
• Experts anticipate that digital coupons will become more popular in 2021, with 3 million users by the end of the year.
• By 2022, digital coupon redemptions are expected to reach $90 billion.

If a coupon marketing strategy is established according to the present budget and defined marketing goals, coupons can help practically any business kind and size.

Advantages of Using Digital Coupon Marketing

Here are some of the advantages of a well-thought-out coupon marketing strategy:

Achieve your Sales Target Faster

Coupons can be used to entice clients to take specific actions that aid in the achievement of sales and marketing goals. Coupons, for example, can help you break even on things that aren’t selling well and upsell your offerings.

Increase your Customer Base

Coupons not only enhance consumer loyalty but also increase the likelihood of them referring your brand to friends and family. Brands that reach out to reward loyal customers with discounts elicit emotional responses, which surely aids in the formation of favorable connections.

Overcome the Competition

Coupon marketing is a terrific strategy to make your offerings more appealing and popular in a competitive retail environment if you find yourself competing with other brands.

Trace your Success Rate

It’s simple to calculate your return on investment (ROI) when you provide promo codes. You don’t have to ask consumers how they found your business when they redeem a promo code online. To measure the success of your promotion, keep track of the number of coupons that have been redeemed.

Potential Disadvantages of Digital Coupon Marketing Strategy

Coupons, like any other business tool, come with a hidden danger that you should be aware of before diving into discounting head first.

Can Cause Brand Damage

Excessive and continuous discounting is likely to affect your brand, making your organization appear less desirable and inexpensive.

Increase Number of One-Time Buyers

An increase in first-time purchases and a decrease in brand loyalty among your customers. This is especially true if your coupons are distributed in public areas, on websites, or through paid promotion.

Less Loyal Customers

Tendency to attract visitors from price-conscious shoppers and clients who aren’t in your target demographic, resulting in fewer repeat purchases, more acquisition expenses, and a waste of promotional funds. Furthermore, if you discount frequently and your plan is transparent and predictable, some customers may try to trick you by skipping regular purchases and waiting till the products are on sale.

Increase Shopping Cart Abandonment

When customers notice the coupon box at the checkout, they may churn and go off in quest of a bargain. Seventy-two percent of carts are abandoned, with half of those who abandon them looking for coupon codes.

Affecting your Bottom Line

You could wind up overpaying your budget or risking fraud if you aren’t diligent and target your promotions correctly. The majority of the negative effects of coupon marketing can be avoided by carefully discounting a reasonable amount, narrowing the target audience, sending unique coupon codes, or not publicizing the discounts. Some of the hazards can be mitigated by using the correct design for your coupon marketing strategy and display. You can limit the potential harm by applying multiple coupon distribution and redemption criteria with the correct coupon supplier. I’ll get to that later.

Setting Goals for your Campaigns

Determine what you want to achieve before launching your coupon promotion. Do you want to increase the number of people who come into your store? Do you want to build your mailing list and collect information about prospective new customers? Are you trying to get rid of some extra inventory?

Here’s a list of coupon marketing goals to get you started designing your next coupon campaign:

Acquiring New Customers

Coupon campaigns are a terrific approach to bring in new customers, whether you want to enter new markets and offer an incentive for first purchases or give a referral discount.

Improving Sales for a Specific Product or Time

Some items or services are seasonal, and sales decline slightly during certain seasons. Discount coupons can help you increase your sales at those times. Airlines, for example, provide lower pricing and bonus coupons during the off-season (summer). You can also increase sales of specific items by selling them in a bundle with a discount voucher using coupons. You can utilize discount coupons to get rid of slow-moving commodities, discontinued items, or products that are about to expire.

Apology Coupons

If a consumer complains, apology or sorry coupons or the value of the service or product returned as a voucher for future use can be offered. In the hospitality sector, this is a fairly popular tactic.

Valuable Customer Data and Customer Consent

With discount coupons, you may encourage email subscriptions, loyalty program participation, profile creation, double opt-in, cookie consent, data tracking, and more. A frequent coupon method is to give a discount on the first purchase after signing up for a newsletter. In light of the new third-party data laws, encouraging consumers to consent to data tracking could be a winning tactic.

Getting feedback from Customers

Coupons can be used to entice clients to participate in a brief brand survey. A 20% discount is worth learning more about potential pain points and improving the usability of your site and the attractiveness of your product. You may also incentivize user-generated content or reviews by giving out coupons.

Cashing on the Holiday Season

On national holidays, when people are more likely to shop, many businesses give public voucher discounts (like before Christmas, on Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Easter, etc). Many restaurants offer discount coupons during holiday seasons. People often prefer to eat at a place where they offer discounts. WIth Super Coupon Surveys you can find all the hotels and restaurants offering coupons on different items.

Reducing Cart Abandonment

Coupon marketing is an effective way to reduce cart abandonment. After a consumer abandons their cart, you can send them emails, push alerts, or other forms of communication with a time-limited special offer if they finish their purchase within that time limit.

Encouraging Customers to Download your Application

There are numerous advantages to having your app on your consumers’ phones. This will later assist you in notifying clients about promotions in real-time, using geolocation for your offers, and keeping your brand top of mind. Customers will be more likely to download your app if you offer app-only coupon discounts or a special download-gratifying voucher.

What Type of Discounts to Offer in your Coupon Campaign?

Once you’ve decided what you want to achieve with your coupon campaign, you can start thinking about what you should provide in order to achieve that goal. You can look into your competitors’ discounts to see what they’re giving. The ideal method is to simply ask your potential consumers what kind of discount they would prefer (through UX research, user groups, or A/B testing, for example).

Here are some examples of incentives you could offer in a coupon campaign to your customers:

• Free Product or Service: For example, if you purchase a lunch meal on Mondays, you’ll get a free dessert, and if you order a full body massage in October, you’ll get a free face massage.
• Upgrade for Free: Consider a free upgrade to your software’s pro version.
• Free Shipping: You can provide free shipping on all orders or orders that exceed a certain threshold, such as $30.
• Discount on Specific Amount: For instance, a $10 discount on orders of $50 or more.
• Percentage Discount: For example, offering 10% discounts on all orders.
• BOGO Offer: Buy one t-shirt and get a second one for free, for example. It could also be a product package discount (buy two t-shirts, get 10 percent off).
• Mystery Discount: You don’t have to define what a voucher entails. You can design a few incentives and send them out to customers in random order. They won’t know what they’ve gotten until they try to use the voucher at the cash register.

How Much Discount is Enough?

This is a difficult topic to answer, and even asking your customers may not provide you with the right answer. Offering lower discounts and monitoring the response are key components of a successful coupon marketing plan. If your objectives aren’t being met, you might reduce your budget even further. Find the smallest discount that will raise purchase rates sufficiently to reach your objectives. If you need to sell out discontinued, slow-moving, or expired products, don’t go below your margins.

Using Targeting in Coupon Marketing

There is no such thing as a customer segmentation that works for every organization, let alone two. Because every organization and audience is different, you’ll need to go deep into the CRM and sales data to determine the criteria for customer segments. Customers can be segmented based on their geography, age, tastes, family status, buying history, brand loyalty, or any combination of these criteria. It is mostly dependent on the items and services you provide. You should select a characteristic that distinguishes consumer preferences and shopping behaviors that can be easily identified in your CRM and use that element to segment your customers.

How to Personalize your Coupon Strategy?

You’ve probably heard that personalization is essential for a successful coupon marketing campaign. I’m sure you’ve heard about, or maybe experienced, the massive privacy breach among modern customers. Personalization in coupon marketing becomes thin ice in these circumstances, and it must be trodden carefully.

Does this imply that it is preferable to forego personalization? Obviously not. The key to operating freely in the field is striking the right balance between the “loss” of privacy that comes with disclosing personal information and the benefits that the consumer receives in return.

43% of consumers consented to share personal information with businesses in order to save money through targeted promotions, discounts, or offers.

You must first understand your audience in order to offer appropriate bargains that allow your customers to save money. This can be accomplished by enticing them to provide their agreement to follow their behavior, access their data, or fill out profiles, preferences, or surveys. Getting a proper customer data platform and the data to feed it, determining which data you want to collect, and guaranteeing data quality are all steps in the customization process. You can begin personalizing promotions once your data and consumer segmentation are complete.

Some ideas on what type of data to collect from customers are:

• Work Occupation
• Social Status
• Location
• Age
• Gender
• Income/Revenue
• Contact Details
• Purchase History
• Preferences over products or services
• Important dates such as birthdays, anniversaries, etc.

Once you have a CRM or CDP in place with lots of good data, you can connect it to your voucher management software and utilize it to personalize coupon promotions. You can use customer data to run advanced promotions, such as a 20% off coupon voucher for children’s clothing only for customers who are based in Germany, between the ages of 25 and 40, who have made at least one purchase from your company, and who have children or have previously purchased any clothes from the children’s category. Without a good database and coupon automation software, this level of personalization would be impossible.

Traditional Coupons vs Digital Coupons

Before we get into the distribution methods, there’s one more item to think about when it comes to your coupon marketing strategy: whether to provide online, traditional, or a combination of both coupons. Clients are increasingly expecting digital coupons and traditional shops and pure online businesses who fail to meet this expectation risk losing customers to the competition if they do not offer coupons online. The digitalization of the retail landscape is unavoidable, as evidenced by the current COVID-19 dilemma. That isn’t to say you can’t use traditional coupons in a printed form anywhere in your funnel; it just means that digital coupons are a must, especially if your target audience is tech-savvy. If you own a physical store, you may simply provide both, or even better, make the same coupons omnichannel and valid both in-store and online.

Consumers are 77% more likely to redeem digital coupons than print coupons, according to studies. Another incentive to switch to digital vouchers is cost. Traditional coupons are less environmentally friendly and use a lot more resources to print, sort, and distribute. Furthermore, unless digital incentives are developed through a digital system, they do not provide detailed tracking that comes with them.

How to Distribute Coupons Effectively?

The location of your coupons is an important aspect of your coupon marketing strategy. You may market your coupons through a variety of media. You should find out where your clients spend the most time and then experiment with those channels. The open and redemption rates may then be viewed, and your coupon distribution strategy can be adjusted accordingly. Naturally, client preferences will vary depending on the customer segment (namely, age and region), thus you should employ multiple channels for different customer segments. We’ve compiled a list of channel suggestions for you below.

Coupon Accumulation Platforms

Your coupons can reach clients who haven’t heard of your brand but are looking for certain products thanks to websites like these. It’s an opportunity to fight against the world’s most powerful companies and win new acquisitions. Groupon and RetailMeNot are two examples.

Emails

One important advantage of email coupon marketing is that it can be extremely tailored. It means more marketing points for them and an opportunity to create 1:1 contacts with potential customers.

Newsletters

Instead of sending emails to all customers, you can provide discounts only to newsletter subscribers to encourage them to sign up for your newsletter.

Social Media

For coupon distribution, social media can be an excellent tool. You can reach out to your current followers by publishing organically on your feed or in your stories, or you can run acquisition efforts on social media and offer coupons in sponsored advertising. You can distribute your coupons through a variety of social media sites, for example (you should choose those that are relevant to your target audience):

• Facebook
• Twitter
• Instagram
• LinkedIn
• Pinterest
• TikTok
• YouTube

Influencers

You can provide influencers with coupon codes to share with their audiences. This can be an excellent approach to reach out to new customer groups. You may compensate your influencers per piece of content or a percentage of sales generated by their discount code.

Partner Websites

You might provide special coupons to your company partners’ customers if you have any. They might then use their websites, social media, and other organic methods to promote their coupons. You may take advantage of their discounts in the same way. As a result, you’ll be able to gain new customers from their network, and vice versa.

Plus, nowadays, there are even websites like Raise where customers can find a wide range of fantastic coupons to secure discounts in stores like Home Depot for example. It is therefore well worth considering reaching out to similar sites like this when launching a coupon for your products or services. Accordingly, you can learn more about some of the different coupons that feature on the Raise website here: https://www.raise.com/coupons/home-depot

SMS

The open rate for SMS is one of the highest of any messaging channel. Customers frequently review all messages they get on their phones, which are considered personal devices (as opposed to email, where they are used to receiving and ignoring massive amounts of spam). You should mix SMS with geo-targeting to get the most out of it. You can snag clients immediately in front of the business using SMS, and a coupon makes the message even more appealing.

Live Chat

Live conversations are becoming increasingly popular. We propose it as a customer service tool that is perfectly adapted to today’s tech-savvy consumer, as well as a terrific marketing tool. You may use your live chat to provide an exceptional client experience and increase sales in addition to serving support inquiries. How? By using a live chat to create flash specials, targeted campaigns, and other coupon ideas.

Surveys

If your organization sends out surveys to gauge customer happiness (e.g., Net Promoter Score), incentives will encourage customers to participate in the development of metrics, increasing the odds of better conversion. There are two easy strategies that businesses can use:

• Send each user an invitation to offer their thoughts, along with a promo code to accentuate the message.
• By delivering the one-of-a-kind coupon, we want to express our gratitude to everyone who offered their thoughts. Coupons can be part of a communication with measurable outcomes or a pre-programmed reaction to a completed survey.

Summary

A complete coupon management system that can be connected to numerous data sources and distribution channels is required for a successful coupon marketing campaign. It should also allow for the mass launch of customized and readily manageable promotions.

Promotional management software serves as the foundation for launching successful coupon promotions. Planning your requirements, finding the correct software, and then launching and optimizing your campaigns should all come first. We hope that this guide will assist you in completing all parts of your next successful coupon campaign, from planning to execution.