How A Coupon Marketing Strategy Could Radically Increase Your Sales In 2019
What Is A Coupon Marketing Strategy?
Why Do I Need A Coupon Marketing Strategy?
According to a recent study an astonishing 90% of consumers use coupons in some way during their buying process, and 57% said they would not have made a purchase without a coupon. That’s an enormous market to be missing out on, if for some reason you’ve never considered a coupon marketing strategy.
Coupon marketing is a great way to garner high ROI (return on investment) marketing, because they not only create general awareness of your brand, these coupon incentives encourage purchases and conversion as well. Traditional marketing, such as commercials and digital brand ads, are wonderful for getting your brand noticed, but nothing offers a higher incentive to buy than a promo code for your newest product or trending items. In fact, customers with a coupon will actually spend 24% more than a customer without, so you not only increase your traffic with coupons, but the visitors of your site will statistically spend more than site visitors who don’t have a coupon.
Digital marketing (using social media marketing or email marketing) has proven to also be the easiest way to track your profitability and exposure. In the digital world, everything can be monitored with tools like Google Analytics, so you can track exactly which promotional codes worked the best, and where those visitors came from.
It has also been found that more visitors will share a social media post or email with a friend than any other method of promotional marketing. This equals reduced spending for you, and a more focused target market for future coupon marketing strategies.
Having a good coupon marketing strategy will also be beneficial for customer retention. Knowing a company consistently offers good deals and promotions on their site keeps customers checking back periodically. In fact, 91% of coupon redeemers have said they will purchase from a retailer again after they have been offered a coupon.
How Can Promotional Marketing Help You Avoid Shopping Cart Abandonment?
One of the dreaded adversaries of eCommerce is the abandoned cart. The abandoned cart rate is at an all-time high currently, at an astounding 75.52%. A cart is considered “abandoned” when a shopper makes it all the way through a shopping experience, including inputting their customer info, and they leave their cart just before paying. The reason for this high shopping cart abandonment rate is contributed to a variety of reasons.
One of the most-cited reasons a buyer will abandon their cart is when they are presented with additional fees at the end of their shopping journey. This could include extra shipping costs, or even taxes. Most big name eCommerce vendors (including websites like Walmart, Amazon, and Best Buy) have such success with their marketing strategy because they eliminate shipping costs.
Making promotional coupons easily accessible and visible on your site, like a free shipping banner running across the top of your homepage. Marketing your coupons and promo codes is only half the battle: they need to be easy to use to complete a checkout.
Your job as an eCommerce provider is guiding your customer through their purchasing journey, and making sure all promotions are easily accessible will make all the difference between a completed conversion and one more abandoned cart.
Neil Patel, one of the leaders of our industry, made this quick, helpful video with a few more tips on combatting shopping cart abandonment.
What Are My Options For Offering Digital Promotions?
So now that we have established the value of a coupon marketing campaign, what are you options? It can be a little daunting trying to come up with a coupon marketing strategy on your own, so we’ve narrowed down some of the most successful ways business owners have promoted their discounts and coupons to customers.
Email Marketing
Email marketing has proven to be one of the most successful methods to not only avoid shopping cart abandonment, but also increase your overall conversion rate. It helps you analyze your cart abandonment rates, and can also help you monitor the success of your individual marketing campaigns.
Here at Epic, we have our very own email re-marketing service that comes with data analysis built in.
For those of you not familiar with our email marketing service, epicBloom is unlike any other. Using “smart” targeting and automations, epicBloom tracks your customers’ purchasing behaviors, email engagements, demographics and more.
We have also implemented abandoned cart emails into our epicBloom system, with great success.
So, what is an abandoned cart email?
Abandoned cart emails are sent to customers who have added a product to their cart, but failed to follow through on a checkout.
One of our most successful features in epicBloom are our abandoned cart emails. These emails are fully customizable to your needs. We have abandoned cart emails set to go out at 1 hour with a 5% discount, 48 hours with a 10% discount, or even 72 hours with a 20% discount.
Our abandoned cart emails can also be segmented, which means a different email will go to each customer depending on the value of the products they left in their cart. For a customer with an abandoned cart at a value of $50, they would receive the 5% discount. For a customer with an abandoned cart at a value of $150, they would receive a 10% discount. For an abandoned cart at a value of $300 or more, they would receive a 15% discount.
The beauty of these emails being fully customizable, is that we make them to fit your needs, and we can target them to your specific customers. What kind of campaign would best benefit your business? If you can dream it, we can do it.
Want to see a free demo? Click here.
For more tips and tricks to using email marketing to your advantage, check out our blog post here.
Social Media Marketing
Another great outlet for promo code marketing is making use of social media marketing. In 2019 social media presence has become vital to businesses looking to build brand awareness, create a sense of authenticity and trustworthiness, and communicate about their product to a wide net of new customers. There are 2.77 billion users on social media a day, and 48% of those users have admitted to purchasing something after seeing an ad. As a business owner looking to expand their platform, you need to be tapping into the world of social media marketing.
Lead Magnets
A great way to not only offer promotions to potential customers, but also gain their contact information is making use of lead magnets. Lead magnets are an incentive that marketers offer to potential buyers in exchange for their email address, or other contact information. These lead magnets usually offer a benefit to the consumer, such as a discount code, or access to a webinar, pdf checklist, or ebook.
An email address is extremely personal, and most customers won’t give their personal information out without good reason or incentive. But there are a lot of ways to successfully use lead magnets to incentivize potential customers, and in doing so gain their contact information for future interaction.
Presenting a lead magnet in a pop-up banner has proven to be widely successful. Give your potential customers a few minutes to browse your site and understand your authority and the value of the content you offer. Then present them with a banner offering a coupon code, a free service, or a downloadable product in exchange for their email address. If they are truly interested in the product or service you have to offer, these site visitors are much more likely to give you their information for future contact.
OptinMonsters offers a great strategy for a lead magnet pop-up that follows a blog post.
“For example, let’s say you have a blog post on the top 10 ways you can improve your customer service. At the end of the post, you ask readers to join your email list for “updates”.
Or instead, you could ask readers to join your email list and get a free, downloadable PDF case study, detailing a real-life example of one business who used these 10 strategies to improve their customer service.
Which offer do you think will get the most email signups?
Precisely– the second one!”
In order for these lead magnets to be successful, they need to follow seven basic principles:
Cart – Level Discounts
Cart-level discounts are a way to set up product discounts based on whether the customer’s shopping cart has met certain criteria, such as including certain products or brands, meeting a certain order amount, or even whether the customer has purchased before.
Offering cart-level discounts are a great way to ensure conversions of a certain amount, and to avoid cart abandonment.
There are many different kinds of cart-level discounts that have proven to be widely successful. Here are a few of our favorites:
– Free Shipping Discounts
As we’ve said before, added shipping costs are the number one reason someone abandons a shopping cart. Offering a minimum number of products, or a minimum dollar amount, can ensure greater conversions, as well as avoid cart abandonment. A free shipping discount would look something like this:
Order at least X units of product, get free shipping!
Order at least $X of product, get free shipping!
Product discounts are the second most popular discount for most eCommerce business owners. A product discount includes most types of BOGO deals. Buy one get one free deals, Buy one of X, get a Y free, or even buy X number of units of Product A, and get Y number of units of Product B for $ or % off each unit.
These deals have proven to be hugely successful, not only for increasing conversion rates, but also moving certain products fast. This kind of deal can not only inspire a customer because of the discount, but can also create a sense of urgency for your customer. Make it clear to your customer that the promotional value will only run while supplies last.
-Category Discounts
-Customer Discounts
We love customer discounts, because it tells your customers that you value them, and they will always get great service and great prices when they come back and shop with you again. It incentivizes your one-time visitor to become a loyal returning customer. For a returning customer (with a registered account!), you can offer a dollar or percentage off of each purchase. This also encourages customers to create a registered account, giving you continual access to communicate with them about more upcoming products and offers they may be interested in.
By making use of these crucial coupon marketing strategies, you will not only increase your brand awareness and conversion rates, but you will naturally generate more traffic to your website and boost your search engine optimization!