5 Coupon Marketing Strategies to Implement in 2024

Introducing coupons and implementing a coupon marketing strategy is an excellent way for e-commerce business owners to improve their sales. Studies have shown that by offering special deals and discounts, customers are more likely to make the purchase. 

While people love a good bargain, it’s becoming difficult for businesses to introduce or promote coupons through traditional marketing methods in this digital era. They must take a proactive approach and also explore new coupon marketing strategies to accomplish their sales goals faster. 

Coupon codes are marketing tools that drive sales and help the company with brand building. By building a modern infrastructure and implementing effective marketing strategies, businesses can grow their customer base and track their return on investment. 

In this guide, we will look at the key reasons e-commerce business owners should adopt coupon marketing, its benefits, and some strategies that you can implement to grow your company. 

Let’s get started!

Why E-commerce Businesses Should Care About Coupon Marketing

In today’s era, where customers are always fishing for coupons, a business should care about implementing an effective coupon marketing strategy to achieve specific goals. 

Coupons can help businesses in many ways, including the following: 

• It can increase customer acquisition by providing a discount for first-time buyers. 
• A coupon code is a great way to sell slow-moving items, old stock, or damaged inventory to make some money and clear up space. 
• Businesses can resolve customer complaints by providing complainants discount codes for their troubles. It’ll improve sales and let the people know that the company cares about them. 
• By using coupons, businesses can incentivize data gathering and tracking, which can be a winning strategy. 

The Benefits of Coupon Marketing in E-commerce

While there are many reasons for a company to adopt a coupon marketing strategy, here are a few benefits for e-commerce business owners:

Achieve Your Sales Goals

A business can achieve its sales objectives by developing an effective coupon marketing strategy that prompts the customers into taking the desired action. By setting up a coupon campaign, a company can break even on slow-moving items and clear up inventory space.

Grow Your Customer Base

Coupons are a great way to increase your loyal customer base. By reaching out to your existing customers and offering them fantastic price savings, you are connecting with them on an emotional level. It helps build a positive association with the brand. 

Track Your Success Rate

While coupons are an effective marketing tool, they also help measure key performance metrics. You can easily calculate how much you’re making on your investment, allowing you to improve your campaigns and strategies accordingly. 

5 Effective Coupon Marketing Strategies to Drive Sales

According to Statista, more than 337 million digital coupons were redeemed in the United States in 2021, a staggering 40 million increase since 2020. 

Around 50% of Americans find these coupons through emails from brands or online searches. Experts are expecting the demand for coupons to rise in the coming years. 

With the rising demand for coupons, businesses must capitalize on this opportunity and implement effective strategies according to their budget and marketing goals.

Here are some coupon marketing strategies that you probably aren’t using:

Offer Free Shipping

According to Baymard Institute, almost 70% of the carts are abandoned during online shopping, and 48% of the time, extra costs like shipping and taxes discourage customers from completing the purchase. 

Businesses can look at these research findings as a learning opportunity. By providing coupons that reduce or eliminate extra costs, companies can incentivize customers to checkout.

Customer Feedback Through Coupons

Businesses must evolve and adapt to the current trends and consumer demands. Companies can improve and grow quickly by learning more about the problems from the customers’ perspectives. 

Since customers love a good discount, why not offer them coupon codes for completing a customer feedback form? Asking the consumers to participate is challenging, but by luring them with exciting price savings, businesses can receive positive criticisms and work on them. 

Targeted Coupon Marketing 

Personalization has become important in today’s digital era, and we’re not referring to a professional email opening with “Hello, Linda!”. 

Making your coupons according to the different segmentations, demographics, behaviors, and other categories is important to personalize the customer’s experience.

Understanding the customers and their relationship with the company is essential. It can help you create an effective coupon marketing strategy. 

CHECKOUT10, for example, can be a coupon that gives 10% off to users who abandon their carts, while Hello20 could offer a 20% discount on a customer’s first purchase. 

Sign-up Coupons

Businesses need to gather as much information as possible about their customers and potential clients. To help them collect data, they can create a sign-up form for the website visitors to fill out. 

While sign-up form can help gather intel about your customers, convincing the user to go the extra mile and sign up can be challenging. 

The best way to lure people into providing their email addresses and other important information is to create powerful homepages and landing pages. 

Designing the homepages and landing pages and strategizing properly can turn into lead magnets, powerful enough to grab the visitor’s attention and keep them hooked. Lead magnets usually provide incentives, such as discount codes, and they’re easy to set up. 

You can set up a lead magnet by providing the system with a condition. If it meets that particular set of rules, it’ll generate an event, such as a popup notification, to convert website traffic. 

A person who scrolls through half of a company’s homepage, for example, may receive a popup with the opportunity to win a discount code if they sign up.

Focus on a Mix of Distribution Channels

There are many different distribution channels that businesses can consider to distribute coupon codes. 

While email marketing is a traditional form of communicating with customers, it is still impactful and a fantastic way of converting inactive people to drive sales. However, there are other ways you can share coupon codes. 

Nowadays, most businesses have a social media presence to stay connected with today’s generation. 

You can engage with your customer base on multiple platforms, including Facebook and Instagram, by conducting polls or activities to win coupon codes. This not only helps create a fun online environment but also aids in brand building and increasing revenue.

To make it easy to handle communication on different distribution channels, you can use a reliable chat plug-in like Chaty.

Mistakes to Avoid in Your Coupon Marketing Strategy

While a well-planned coupon marketing strategy can help boost sales, it can also hurt your business if you’re not careful. Here are a couple of mistakes that you should avoid:

Excessive Discounts

Discounts are great every now and then. It can create enough hype to generate the desired response from the customers. 

However, if you’re constantly providing coupon codes, people might view the brand as cheap and less desirable, which can have an adverse impact on your business’s brand. 

Lack of Analytical Insights

When implementing a coupon marketing strategy for a business, measuring its performance is essential in determining its success. Analytical insights can help provide information that you can use to improve your strategy and align it with your company’s goals. 

Most businesses that offer coupon codes fail to realize that the people they’re attracting are often price-driven shoppers. They’ll make a one-time purchase and may never return again. This can impact the return on investment, leading to high customer acquisition costs. 

You’ll end up burning through your marketing budget without actually helping the company grow if you fail to analyze your coupon campaigns. 

Measurement Metrics to Track

To help measure the performance of a coupon campaign, you can use many different metrics, including the following: 

• The percentage of customers who use the coupon; 
• Average order value; 
• The amount of sales generated with the coupon compared to average returns; 
• Customer lifetime value; and
• Return on investment. 

With coupons, you can find out who uses the discount code and how much money they’re spending. Plus, e-commerce business owners can conduct surveys after implementing a coupon marketing strategy to receive customer feedback. 

There are also statistical and analytical tools that you can use to analyze the data from your coupon campaigns, and these include A/B testing, regression, and segmentation, among others.

Final Thoughts

An effective coupon marketing strategy can help a company achieve its sales goals and grow its customer base. It is also a fantastic way to gather more data and track your coupon campaigns, which can provide helpful insights through various statistical tools and techniques.  

There are many different coupon marketing strategies that you can consider. However, it’s essential to assess the impact of a well-developed campaign on the company’s goals. 

Additionally, there are certain pitfalls associated with sharing coupon codes, which e-commerce business owners must stay clear of. 

Coupon X is a fantastic tool for e-commerce business owners who are looking to implement discount popups and generate coupon codes for their websites. It has many features that help you target your most qualified leads and engage with them while showing unique discount popups based on the website visitor’s behavior.  Get started with Coupon X and increase your sales today!