User:LepageHart886
Recently i read a magazine called 'Marketing with New Media' by Lena Claxton and Alison Woo. Among the marketing concepts that they promote is by using coupons when emailing. This can be a good idea because, let's be honest, many people really like a freebie or perhaps a discount. The problem is how you can develop a strategy which will promote your business without them costing too much in what you allow away together with your coupon.
The very first strategy is to determine what can be a service or product that your many people could be interested in. A totally free herring flavoured chocolate chip cookie would not attract many customers. Nor would free chocolate cookies entice many purchasers to purchase more of unwanted weight loss products.
This is a great start, however, the second part, you might also need to think about whom you want to attract. Would you like your existing people to come back or are you interested in getting new customers? It all depends to some extent on which is the reach of your e-zine or newsletter.
The third real question is would you like to create a loss in your coupon or not? Loss leaders can be ideal for bringing in the inquisitive customer, but hand out too many and you will have a big hole. This may be your decision, as you would like to create the shoppers into your online or physical shop.
Now it gets harder. Would you like to limit your coupons to some certain number? You can do this quite easily if you are using an expert emailing service. These may be complicated and frequently expensive for setup so that you can use professional resellers. Alternatively, you can declare inside your coupon which will only apply to the first 100 to present it, or until a certain date. Here, you can also add extra functionality online by requiring people to give more details about themselves when accessing or presenting the coupon. This applies both to online and physical stores.
Then you have to determine how it works. Set a lot of conditions and customers won't bother. I did previously always present my loyalty card at my supermarket and then try to buy those products for which I had coupons to give me extra points. But the conditions for redeeming those points were so difficult and that i needed to have spent so much money to achieve so very little, I threw my loyalty card away.
Lastly, you have the graphical style of the coupon itself. If it's not attractive people won't click on it. If it is too complicated, the viewer will click to another page. Remember KISS - Make it simple Stupid.
In a nutshell, coupons are wonderful, but you must strategize to increase your chance before you go ahead.
