Tips for a Winning Coupon Marketing Strategy in 2021

Does coupon marketing still work in 2021? Yes, absolutely. A thousand times over. It’s no wonder, a 94% rise in coupon redemption is expected by 2022 according to Juniper Research.

Especially in a time when customers are tired of all the advertising clutter, coupons offer a more engaging and non-intrusive way for brands to drive sales. We are not talking about those little promo vouchers that your thrifty grandparents clipped from magazines and newspapers a few decades ago. Today, coupons are digital, incredibly trackable, and customizable.

Why Choose Coupon Marketing?

Who doesn’t love a good deal! When sent via email, offered up on the website, or even shared on your social media page, coupons are a great way to incentivize new or infrequent customers to make a purchase.

Coupon Marketing:

1. Delivers improved loyalty
2. Creates a sense of urgency to take action
3. Engages consumers, especially those who are price-sensitive
4. Satisfies Gen Z’s need for instant gratification

As Don Draper of Mad Men put it, “Miss Mencken, coupons work.” They really do.

4 Ways to Supercharge Your Coupon Marketing Strategy

A successful coupon marketing program is typically data-driven, relevant, timely, well-planned, and efficient. It also will get heavy engagement (i.e sales and shares) and will be part of some user-generated content.

If you are thinking of running your own coupon marketing program and want it to be the best yet, here are a few smart strategies to keep in mind:

Adopt a Competitive Coupon Strategy

When well-planned, coupons have the potential to deliver consistent sales and brand recall in the long term. To that end, here is how you can build a competitive coupon strategy:

1. Identify your target customers. Be sure to check out Google Analytics to understand the demographics of your website visitors.
2. Adopt the right mix of defensive and offensive couponing. This means you distribute the bulk of your coupons amongst your own consumers to buy their loyalty. At the same time, set aside a few coupons to poach your rival’s customers.
3. Reach out to them with considerable accuracy and cost effectiveness. For instance, to reduce the high rates of cart abandonment (70% average documented online shopping cart abandonment rate), consider embedding a discount coupon in your winback email. If you send such targeted mails with the right coupon face value, you stand to secure significant ROI. Alternatively, you could add coupons to lead forms or use limited time offers.
4. Boost coupon stickiness. To maximize exposure and customer follow-through, make sure that the coupon itself is well designed. It needs to have:
   • Clear and sharp messaging – too much text will just bore the customer. They are on the coupon to quickly move to a purchase, so help convince them to do so with a monetary incentive. Also, make sure the call to action (CTA) is visible.
   • Engaging visuals to capture attention
   • A clear expiration date to retain the attractiveness of the offer
5. Harness a smart tool to make your coupons discoverable. If you wish to get a bigger bang for your buck (in this case, your coupons), you should get it picked up by top-performing publishers, coupon platforms, and bloggers. It’s incredibly important to keep an open line of communication with your top publishers and affiliates. Manually reaching out to them tends to be a mundane and time-consuming process. FMTC is your best solution. FMTC enables your coupons, with your own personalized and monetized links, to get automatically and seamlessly fed to affiliates sourced from 23 networks via an API datafeed going directly to publishers. You can also manage your offers and coupons individually, so they are either sent to all publishers within FMTC or made exclusive to select affiliates. There is no better way to scale your coupon campaign with multiple affiliates.
6. Analyze campaign data to improve ROI. As with anything in marketing, data is king. Creating unique links and coupon codes per affiliate enables you to measure the success of your couponing campaigns. You need to be tracking the count of coupons distributed, redemption rates, face values, and incremental sales per redemption.

And once you set SMART goals for your coupon campaign, you can take cues from the historical data analysis to optimize your program at least once a month. FMTC makes this process a lot easier by offering smart insights into your best-performing affiliates.

Pooja Pillai and The FMTC Team