Trying to navigate the world of coupon sites can be challenging as retailers seek to gain exposure and traffic without sacrificing margin or compromising the brand. While much of the focus over the past few years has been about “if” retailers should work with coupon sites, the real focus for many retailers should be on “how” to do so productively.
As with any successful marketing program, it starts with aligning your promotional strategy with your brand and business goals. Read on to find out:
- Whether you should work with a coupon site.
- What an effective online promotion strategy can give your brand.
- How to get a great return on your investment.
- How to build successful relationships with individual coupon sites.
Should You Work With Coupon Sites?
Traditionally, online retailers have leveraged coupon sites under the belief that they bring great reach and results. But there are some efficiencies and considerations to keep in mind.
For example, if your brand is advertising on a coupon site but you don’t offer coupons or don’t want to be associated with discounts, working with coupon sites likely wouldn’t support your business strategy.
Conversely, if you sell commodity products that have a lot of competition and if discounts are important for driving sales, partnering with coupon sites could make a lot of sense.
Additionally, if your online marketing efforts are mature and you’re looking for additional sales levers to pull, coupon sites could be a good opportunity if you use some creativity to ensure they’re supporting your overarching business goals.
What Coupon Sites Can Do for You
If you carefully navigate your way through the available options, coupon sites can provide a powerful way to drive brand awareness and sales. These sites have broad reach and access to huge user bases, which can help you connect with your target customers and increase brand awareness, loyalty, and impulse buys. But to truly reap the benefits of coupon sites, retailers must figure out exactly where they need help and drive these opportunities.
Here are examples of retailers leveraging coupon sites to:
Drive in-store sales.
A global brand with both online and brick-and-mortar stores was interested in testing whether affiliates could drive offline sales. Five top coupon sites were given printable coupons with unique barcodes that could be redeemed for an in-store discount. Over the course of the three-month test, the five coupon sites drove 17 percent of the total affiliate program sales in brick-and-mortar stores.
The in-store team gained a new mechanism to drive sales, the affiliate team was pleased with the increase in sales, and the coupon sites enjoyed the increased commissions, as well as the opportunity to prove their value.
Sell excess inventory.
A leading athletic apparel retailer had excess inventory that was difficult to sell because it only included limited sizes and colors. This liability was turned into a major opportunity by creating an affiliate-exclusive private sale. The retailer created a hidden landing page with the excess inventory and offered coupon sites an exclusive coupon code on the limited-time private sale. The sale ran during an otherwise slow sales week. Affiliates sold the inventory in three days, and weekly revenue increased 46 percent compared to the same week the previous year.
Results like these are hard to ignore, and the deals these sites offer make your brand even harder to ignore. So how can you duplicate those kinds of results for your company? By making each coupon site you work with part of an airtight marketing strategy.
How to Use Coupon Sites Effectively
Here are a few tips for making the most of coupon sites:
1. Choose your partners wisely. You don’t have to associate your company with every coupon site in existence to make the most of your online promotion strategy. Being selective with partners and placements ensures you’re not overinvesting or spreading your marketing efforts too thin.
Compliance is also a large part of the coupon business, and trying to monitor 100 sites is nearly impossible. This is why it’s essential to work with coupon sites that have account managers who are innovative, responsive, and results-focused. Some coupon sites with strong account management teams include RetailMeNot, Brad’s Deals, and Coupons.com.
2. Actively manage your relationships. The best strategies for leveraging coupon sites involve tight management structures, where an in-house manager or independent third-party agency works closely with his counterpart at the coupon site to create a strategy tailored to your brand.
Utilizing experienced in-house managers or specialized third-party firms will help you make educated choices, optimize your campaigns, and establish success metrics to ensure your ideal customers find your products. If you don’t pay any attention to your partners and don’t provide them with content, incentives, or direction, you shouldn’t expect great results.
3. Set commissions based on value. Coupon sites won’t be worthwhile for you if they don’t encourage the behavior you want from customers. Companies are increasingly putting less value on clicks and sales that come after the product is in the cart or from a trademark search. They’re placing a higher value on actively promoted offers and in-store coupons.
To build a successful relationship with a coupon site, adjust your commission structure to reward your partners for the actions you value, and avoid paying out large commissions on cart-based traffic. Your coupon site strategy should sit right at the top of the sales funnel or focus on winning back customers.
4. Focus on offers and placements. Once you have a secure, holistic strategy in place for managing your participation across a range of coupon sites, you can focus on building relationships with individual sites. Make your offers clear and easy for affiliates to use. Deliver simple, compelling commissions, and offer performance incentives for surpassing sales goals to make promoting your brand more attractive.
It’s essential to update your offers regularly. Develop new, unique promotions for each site you work with, and jump on their blogging, social media, and email opportunities so they’re incentivized to promote your brand.
5. Track results and incrementality. Carefully choose a tracking platform to accompany your promotion strategy that will allow you to get a holistic view of where your sales are coming from and which channels are responsible. Incrementality can show you which efforts are delivering new customers and which are simply targeting existing customers.
Tracking and analyzing the customer journey at regular intervals will allow you to understand how coupon sites are supporting your goals, increase your average order value, and improve your bottom line.
6. Keep it fresh. It may seem obvious, but it’s important that you keep your offers fresh so you’re ready to strike while the iron is hot. Try out a few different kinds of offers to see what moves the needle, and refine as you go. Favor single-use coupon codes over more universally accepted coupon codes, and expire your coupons within a reasonable amount of time so they stay within the intended channels. This not only makes it easier to track results, but it also creates a sense of urgency for shoppers.
By shaping your strategy and investing in each site you use, you can leverage online promotions to drive awareness, attract and excite new and existing customers, and grow your ROI in the long run. How are you shaping your coupon site strategy to serve your brand?
photo credit: rose3694 via photopin cc
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