12 Coupon Marketing Strategies for eCommerce Businesses in 2023

Coupons affect the buying decision of almost every consumer.

Irrespective of their underlying age group. It won’t be wrong if I say that you’re missing out on the big opportunities by not using coupons at your store.

Before starting ahead, I’d like to clear out one major misconception about coupons.

Indeed coupons are essentially discounts. However, they ain’t restricted to discounts only. Coupons have a much wider application area and can be used in many fun-filled ways to drive more sales.

Therefore, in this blog, you’ll learn about some key coupon marketing strategies for 2023 and their benefits for your business.

Let’s dive right in.

What is Coupon Marketing?

Coupon marketing is no rocket science.

It is a way to use coupons or vouchers to attract and convert users into customers by rewarding them with exciting offers.

The key objective behind using coupons is to increase the checkouts, customer lifetime value(CLV) as well as their experience. Simply put, coupon marketing is a marketing gimmick to attract more sales by offering customers attractive discounts.

Both the descriptions are true in their own senses. Digital or physical coupons, both are widely used to outgrow instant sales. Building coupon marketing strategies with digital coupons, however, facilitate more opportunities. You can cater to a wider audience, generate more sales and offer more targeting discounts people related with.

eCommerce Coupon Marketing: Global Trends and Practices

Digital coupon marketing is already a part of sophisticated marketing tools. They drive in more sales, build customer loyalty, improve brand image and boost brand recognition value.

The stats below are the real proofs of how much coupons are benign preferred today among multiple industries:

• 8 out of 10 customers sign up for the emails only to receive discount codes.
• 90% of total consumers use coupons.
• 63% of shoppers say they want coupons to be more available.
• Predictions say that digital coupon redemptions shall surpass $90 billion by 2022.
• An email containing a coupon has a 14% better open rate, 34% more unique clicks, 27% transaction completion rate, and a 48% revenue/email rate.

Note: Check the infographic below for more coupon marketing and trends data.

12 eCommerce Coupon Marketing Strategies to Boost your Sales

Let’s talk about a few types of coupon marketing strategies that stuff your pipeline with revenue, lower abandoned cart rates, and increase customer lifetime value.

1. Cut Additional Costs with Discount Coupons

eCommerce stores always struggle with abandoned carts.

On average, 69.99% of the carts are abandoned in online shopping.

And do you know what’s the biggest reason for it?

Additional costs. 48% of the carts are abandoned because of the extra costs like tax, shipping fee, etc.

But you can turn this opportunity into business by using discount coupons. You can offer discount coupons to your customers that eliminate the shipping costs, tax, or delivery fee.

These discounts are more effective and better convince users to checkout.

Source: WPBeginner

Believe it or not, a mere $2 shipping cost on a $10 product can turn off your buyers. Resulting in an abandoned cart or lost revenue.

In such cases, you can offer discounts to slash these extra costs. This will show your customers that you’re not charging anything extra other than the product’s costs, and they’ll pay you without thinking twice.

This is a type of coupon marketing strategy you can employ to multiply your checkout rate and revenue.

2. Exchange Discount Coupons with Feedback

Businesses also evolve like humans.

You can’t survive today with a strategy you followed a couple of decades back.

You have to improve your business every day to become better. And customer feedback can pave your way towards improvement.

But, collecting customer feedback gets tricky for many companies. In a world where people refrain from liking a YouTube video, who would give you feedback?

Thus, you need to lure them with an offer against their feedback.

And what’s better than a discount? So in this type of coupon marketing, you can share a discount coupon in exchange for feedback. Receiving a reward for feedback appeals more to users and gives them a reason to review you.

3. Offer Personalized Coupons to Specific Segments

Personalization doesn’t mean starting your email with Hello Linda, or Hi Greg.

You have to make your offers based on your customers’ demographics, psychographics, pain points, and behavior to personalize their experience. The same goes for coupon marketing.

You need to understand your customers thoroughly and then give them the coupons based on the above factors.

For example, here are some types of coupon codes to offer for different customer segments:

• New user: HELLO20 – 20% off on the first purchase.
• Loyal customers: LOYALTY40 – 40% off for loyal customers.
• Inactive customers: BUYAGAIN25 – 25% off on a purchase for customers inactive for 6 months.
• Cart abandoners: CHECKOUT10 – 10% discount for users who abandoned their cart for over 3 days.

For this, you can segment your customers into different groups based on their behavior, interests, location, etc.

You can use a CRM like HubSpot to segment your customers into different groups. And then distribute relevant coupons to them.

4. Create FOMO for Your Discounts

Fear of missing out (FOMO) has an amazing convincing power. Even the data from multiple pieces of research claim that customers feel anxious about missing out on the deals and offers on the products they want to buy.

50% of Millennials find limited-time offers more appealing. (socialmediapolis.com)

Formulating your coupon marketing strategies with limited-time offers works well to attract customers who are mostly in the decision-making or consideration stage of their buying journey. These time-bound offers generally are put on display during product launches or special sale fests during festive seasons.

To spread the word about your limited-time coupon offers, you can also roll out pre-event promotional emails among your constant customers and subscribers. Or you can also initiate a pre-event sale, especially for your subscribed customers just like Amazon Prime Sales Festivals.

5. Offer Discounts Coupons on Sign-ups

The first step in a customer journey is to have them sign up. But most of the users step back once they see that sign up form. So how do you persuade them to sign up?

Using discount coupons right.

Your lead forms, homepage, and landing pages hold special powers. If designed and strategized well, they act as the lead magnets to attract new users. The lead magnets are easygoing and offer multiple incentives according to your business type and the preferences of your customers.

Setting up lead magnets on your website as a pop-up, popping every time after your customer performs the specified actions like spending specified time on your website, scrolling 50% of your webpage, etc. gives you ample opportunities to entice and convert your visitors.

6. Use A Blend of Distribution Channels

Do you know the best part of creating and working with coupons?

You can promote them anywhere and everywhere.

Yes, although, the traditional method of sharing coupon codes via email is still very much powerful. But, the evolution of social channels like Facebook, Instagram, etc., or the direct application of coupons during final checkout also promotes the reach and use of coupons, respectively.

The more your coupons reach the end users, the better the chances of getting more leads. Even the surveys say that 71% of customers follow brands for the coupons and giveaway offers.

So you can use social media to share and promote your discount coupons. Before doing that, analyze and find the right platforms for your business. Where your audience spends most of their time? Encash that platform. But also combine the preferred platform with other channels to share the benefits of coupons for customers.

7. Offer Tempting Discounts to Insiders

If you have some insider memberships, this tip is for you.

You can offer some special discounts to your existing members. It’ll reward your existing members and make them feel it was worth subscribing to. On top of that, these discounts will tell your non-members why they should subscribe. Eventually increasing your subscription rate.

Simply put, it’s a win-win for you.

Remember, retaining subscribers these days is like catching a butter-dipped baseball. You have to come up with tricks to keep them with you. And discount coupons can be the glove you can use to have a tight grip at your subscribers.

8. Elevate Your Coupon Referral Program

Referral marketing is another highly popular vertical of marketing methodologies and is essentially reliable in coupon marketing strategies. The concept of referral marketing is fairly easy to grab and understand. The first person with the referral code is referred to as a referrer.

Each referrer receives a unique coupon code for taking an action. Whenever the referrer introduces any new prospect(referred) to the business, they share a referral coupon for them to use when making an order. Once the order is completed the referred and the referrer both get a dedicated set of rewards/discounts.

9. Push Your Slow-selling Items

Not all products sell on demand.

It’s okay to have a few non-selling or less-selling products in-store too. However, not strategizing to sell them can be a considerable situation; asking for losses, yourself.

The most accommodating solution to increase the sales rate of such products is by either selling them at heavy discounts or putting them as upselling offers with additional coupons.

Upselling less-selling items is a common practice and pairing them with percentage discount coupons up to 10% or 15% gives a considerable guarantee that your customer will accept the offer.

10. Encourage Your Customers to Spend More

If you read carefully, I said earlier that coupons have many significant applications too than just discounts. This coupon marketing strategy inculcates coupons to boost the spending power of your customers.

Yes, you can add the spending threshold to boost your average order value.

For example:

Also, you might have seen that sometimes when you’re almost ready to checkout, you get a notification as, “You’re only $10 away from a 15% discount on your entire order!”.

Such coupons and offers give your customers a reason to shop extra in thirst for the percentage discount. Hence, increasing the chances of your customers adding more to their order.

11. Pay Attention to Your Coupon’s Appearance

Start caring about your discount coupon design. You can ask yourself, what should the coupon code look like?

Having an appealing coupon designed also increases the chances of customers redeeming it.

Here’s a cool example of a well-designed discount coupon from Optinmonster,

So stop ignoring your coupon design and start paying attention to it. Remember, crafting your coupon’s appearance can shoot up your sales.

12. Monitor Your Coupon Success

Last but not at all the least.

Keeping tabs on your coupons’ success is as important as creating them. If you don’t know your high and low-used coupons, you’ll have trouble strengthening your coupon marketing strategy.

So you can use a tool like HubSpot CRM to keep track of your coupon usage.

Now I’m not paid to promote HubSpot CRM here. I’m recommending it as it keeps all your data in one place. This way, you don’t need to open multiple windows in your browser to track different data.

You can create reports in your HubSpot CRM, for example, coupon usage to check which coupons are claimed the most and least as well.

Benefits of Using Coupon Marketing Strategies

At a superficial level, it seems that customers get the majority of the benefits from coupons. But if you look closely, you’ll see that there are businesses at the receiving end of coupon benefits.

The few most-seek benefits of having coupon marketing strategies planned are:

Lower Abandoned Cart Rates

As I earlier mentioned, additional costs result in abandoned carts.

But offering discounts to eliminate those costs can shoot up your transactions. Resulting in higher checkouts and lower abandoned cart rates.

Above all, lower abandoned cart rates also ensure that you recover most of your revenue. As a result, you’ll see a hike in your revenue as well.

Better Customer Lifetime Value

Customer lifetime value is the amount a business can expect a customer to spend till s/he remains your client.

Customer Lifetime Value = Customer value x Avg. Customer Lifespan

Discounts persuade customers to spend more at your store. And if a customer’s spending value increases, the customer’s lifetime value also goes up.

As a result, you’ll have more valuable customers who are ready to spend more at your store.

Higher Sign-ups and Quality Leads

Data shows that more than 80% of people in the US sign up for emails only to receive discount coupons.

And why would they sign-up for a discount?

You guessed it right. To shop.

This means, by distributing discount coupons you will not only get more sign ups to your emails. But, you will also get a list of customers who are ready to convert.

Escalated Sales Graph

If you have ever connected with a smart sales rep in a one-on-one conversation, you’ll know that today they focus more on relationship-building than direct selling.

But why do they do so?

Because, by relationship building, you understand your customer’s buying behavior better. Hence, you know the problems of your customers better. Therefore, targeting customers on their pain points with personalized coupons tends to achieve better results in return.

More so, coupons can be used as incentives luring customers into performing desired actions like upselling “less-selling” items of your store with coupons or achieving other marketing objectives.

How MakeWebBetter Helps You with Discount Coupons?

MakeWebBetter has been helping eCommerce businesses for more than 7 years.

As a HubSpot elite solutions partner, MakeWebBetter specializes in helping businesses using HubSpot.

And for those, we’ve created a HubSpot app called Automated Coupons.

This app helps you create discount coupons for your WooCommerce store and deliver them automatically using HubSpot workflows.

You can install this app from the HubSpot marketplace or access directly from here. Connect your HubSpot account and WooCommerce store and then create rules like sign up, review, birthday, etc. to reward your users with discount coupons.

In The End…

There is no doubt that coupons are the evergreen sales booster technique. And, of course, it holds a great marketing section under its cover. The benefits and coupon marketing strategies discussed above are the most common results and approaches followed for implementing coupons.

I am curious to know your coupon marketing strategy. Please share it in the comments section, if you’re supposed to.