How To Make Coupons Work Better In Your Email Program?

You are certainly not the only one or the first email marketer who is thinking of including coupon program in your email marketing efforts. The overnight success of local coupons through daily-deal sites for example, Groupon and the potential offered by mobile coupons are motivating more retailers to have a look at this popular revenue as well as traffic driver from a new dimension.

Jonathan Treiber, Co-Founder and CEO of RevTrax, a leading provider of cross-channel and coupon program analytics had discussed important factors and challenges for email marketing coupons and covered precise examples of successful coupon programs in the recent webinar, “Key Techniques for Maximizing Results from Email-Based Coupons.”

Best Practices for Email Coupons:

• Use personalized coupons: “This makes a coupon specific to an individual, with their name, the nearest location and other details. Personalization has two effects: It typically drives higher user engagement and redemption because it’s more relevant. And, because the coupon is personalized to the individual, it can deter that individual from any type of fraudulent behavior, such as Photoshopping it or reposting it.”
• Don’t deliver the coupon via a downloadable PDF: “We always recommend against that because it’s not secure, promotes uncontrolled virility, and makes it very difficult to track and measure redemption,” Jonathan said. PDFs can be altered, uploaded and shared without authorization.
• Deliver the coupon on a landing page rather than in the email itself to avoid fraud: “It’s really best not to show the entire coupon in the email,” he said. “Show the coupon only when the user prints it. Also, limit the number of times a coupon can be printed.”
• Test coupon values: “This affords marketers with a way to constantly refine different strategies,” Jonathan said. “They can identify whether a 20-percent discount offer is necessary to drive business goals, or is 10 per cent off enough?”
• Measure and track the right coupon activities: “If a consumer prints a coupon, only 20 percent are likely to redeem it,” Jonathan said. “A lot of merchants think that if someone prints a coupon, they’ll automatically redeem it, but half of the time, they lost it or forget about it, or it sits on a counter and expires.”

Many merchants don’t track any coupon activity, he said. “They can’t do it, or they don’t have the time or resources. We encourage our clients to measure as often and as much as they can, because it’s a key benefit. It provides a level of measurement not available or possible without a coupon.”

What to measure? “Look at the number of redemptions, but also measure back to the particular marketing tactic. If you had 100 coupons redeemed, did these 100 coupons get redeemed from a marketing program on Facebook or from your email marketing activities, more specifically, from specific subscribers to your email rewards list?”

“Did redemptions come from a Google search on a particular keyword? What was the rate of redemption for each promotion?” Clients want those types of insights but have never been able to get them through email marketing historically.