Smart eCommerce Coupon Strategies

Hello World! Welcome Friends! Everybody loves getting a deal, which makes coupons a great way to get new business as well as incentivize existing customers. When you have new products to promote or items you need to move, these smart eCommerce coupon strategies will stir your customers to take action. The key is to make sure your offerings speak directly to their needs and interests.

Remarkably, even modest coupon offerings can produce significant gains. Benefits include attracting new customers, retaining existing ones, encouraging the adoption of new products and invigorating the sales of slower-moving merchandise. Of course you do have to be careful to avoid giving away the store. For this reason, you should always do a cost/benefit analysis to ensure your potential for return makes the initiative worth executing.

One of the most popular coupon promotions is free shipping. Here, you have to be especially careful though. To avoid winding up in a situation where you’re paying $5 to ship a product with a $2 margin, limit the offer to orders over a certain dollar amount—for example; “Free shipping for orders of $88 or more.” This encourages customers to buy bigger ticket items, gives them the feeling they got a better deal and helps you move more merchandise. It’s a win-win-win situation.

Buy two get one free, or buy one get one free promotions also generate results. This is a good strategy to employ when you have a lot of stock of a particular item, particularly if it is a consumable good, as opposed to a durable one. Remarkably, the potential for profit is greater in this type of promotion than it is in percentage-off sales. After all, when customers use this coupon, even though they’re getting a third of the price off of each item, all three items ship in the same package. This is much less costly than shipping three items in three separate packages.

Cash for credit coupons are great for encouraging repeat business. “Spend $60 and get $12 off of your next purchase,” will incentivize customers to buy an item at full price, pay shipping for it, then come back and get a slightly discounted price on a different product, for which they will also pay full shipping charges. While they’re on your site looking to take advantage of the discount, they’ll likely find other items they need too. This moves even more product.

When you’re just starting out, promotions like these can be very useful for ramping up your volume. If you’re using a free eCommerce website builder, make sure it includes promo and coupon code generators to help automate these promotions based upon your customers’ buying patterns.

Configuring your site in this way also makes customer loyalty coupons easier to employ. Your platform should be configured to keep track of repeat customers and offer them coupons from time to time. “Returning customers get XX% off of any purchase.” This strategy can also be used to get your existing customer base to evangelize. You can offer them a discount coupon for being a repeat customer and give them a coupon code to pass on to a friend. This gets them to buy from you again and refer you to someone else so you can repeat the process.

Whichever method you decide to use among these smart eCommerce coupon strategies, it’s important to keep your offers simple, include expiration dates to instill a sense of urgency and make using them as easy as possible for your customers. You also want to keep track of how your different promotions fare so you can determine where your best returns are.

Thank you for stopping by! Don’t forget, today is Day Two of our Spring Tour. Pop on over to Make it Pretty to get the schedule. Have a glorious day/night depending on where you are in the world! Go with God and remember to be kind to one another!

Toodles,