The use of coupons for shopping has been around for quite a long time. Never before has their necessity been embraced by both retailers and customers as today. In fact, couponing has become one of the trendiest things when it comes to smart shopping.
In addition, this free coupon website and many others have made it their duty to reveal promotions deals that would help shoppers take home great discounts. While it all seems to only benefit the buyer, dishing out coupon codes has proved to be a splendid marketing strategy for online store owners.
1. Beat your Competitors
In business, there is never a day without competition. How much you earn and how long your business takes to grow is determined by your efforts to fight off competition. If you are selling similar items with other sites, slicing off a part of the price is sure to get you more traffic and sales than your rivals.
There is no better way of doing this than offering coupon codes on the products in question.
2. Attract new Customers
One of the very common habits of online shoppers is to choose the retailer whose prices are lower. Keep in mind the fact that one of the main reasons people shop online is to search for the best deal. After ensuring that the site has the item they need, the next thing they look at is the price.
Therefore, you have a huge advantage over your competitors if you offer a better deal than them even when the customer has visited different sites. Furthermore, new customers are likely to stay simply because they have found the best place to shop and they don’t have any reason for searching for alternatives anymore.
3. Encourage Closing of Sales
Coupon discounts inspire shoppers to quickly come into a buying decision and close a sale. They perceive offering the coupon codes by the retailer as a form of goodwill and they may feel indebted to buy the product.
In other words, most shoppers consider a discount as a sign that the retailer has their best interests in mind. You can also offer coupon codes to first buyers in order to motivate quicker purchasing decisions. When shoppers know an opportunity will run out soon, they are likely to jump at it.
4. Reward Loyalty
Coupon codes can easily be the best ways of showing loyal customers that you appreciate them. In fact, this is a win for both you and your customers. On one hand, the loyal shopper will have to buy the product in order to get the discount.
his means that you achieve more sales. On the other hand, the customers get the products at a lesser price than other shoppers. This will make them feel that their loyalty has paid off and they will in return reward you by remaining loyal.
5. Performance Tracking and ROI Measurement
Promotion codes can be excellently exploited in tracking the channels used in sales in order to know which ones are the best for the business. You can allow your marketing partners certain discounts for distribution to customers in order to find out the channels that get most sales.
You can then decide to work out a plan for optimization of the best performing channels. In addition, you can measure your return on investment (ROI) for advertising through promotion codes.
You just need to give each outlet a unique code to enable you to calculate the exact number of sales generated by every campaign. The results will guide you in your making of optimization choices.
Bottom-line
One of the worst fears for online businesses when it comes to offering promotion codes is the likelihood that they will run into losses and probably go under. The worries can be easily allayed by the fact that while discounts will eat into your profits, they don’t have to take it all. In actual sense, the overall effect of promotion codes is increased profit as a result of more sales.
However, you should come up with a proper plan and understand the unit economics of your business before offering promotion codes. This will not only enable you to maximize your gains with the discounts you offer your customers but measure the performance of your marketing and distribution channels.
