12 Coupon Marketing Strategies for eCommerce Businesses

As a buyer, everyone knows that purveying random discount coupons can never bring about sustainable sales—and so it all lies in the systematical implementation of your coupon marketing strategies. Adding further to their experience you can automate personalized coupons delivery.

Here, identifying your customers’ pain points proves crucial in defining the value proposition of your couponing strategies. Such couponing tactics can make or break your paying customer base.

Coupons affect the buying decisions of almost every consumer. But, today we’ll determine the touchpoints and incorporate them strategically into coupon marketing.

Let’s dive right in!

What are Customer Pain Points & what does Coupon Marketing has to do with it?

Customer pain points can be broadly categorized into four areas: Price Sensitivity, Productivity/Time Efficiency, Process/Usability Experience, and Trust & Support.

At first glance, anyone will say, price sensitivity seems to be the only pain point that coupon marketing strategies can address. But, let’s loosen up a bit and explore coupon marketing benefits.

Price Sensitivity arises when the perceived value of a product doesn’t justify its cost. Meaning, when your customers feel they’re paying too much for what they’re getting. This often stems from high product prices, unexpected fees (shipping, setup, hidden charges), or a lack of clear value. So, a straightforward way to tackle is—automate personalized coupons offering on specific products or categories.

What Else can Coupon Marketing Achieve other than Mitigating Price Sensitivity?

We discussed that coupon marketing can do more than just ease price concerns. It can also:

• Build trust and support by offering competitive prices, free shipping, and hassle-free returns.
• Enrich usability experience through first-purchase discounts, compensatory coupons for delayed deliveries, or incentives for trying new products.
• Encourage engagement by rewarding customer feedback, reviews, and other interactions with exclusive discounts.

So, what is coupon marketing?

Coupon marketing is more than just a marketing gimmick—it’s a strategic way to engage, and retain customers by offering special deals that ultimately improves coversion, revenue, and overall marketing ROI.

Although it may sound like a blind throw, a well-crafted coupon strategy can make all the difference for both your customer and the business.

For Example

By leveraging coupon marketing for eCommerce startups, you have better chance at converting those interested in your offering, but hesitating due to pricing concerns. Or, they need a little extra push to make a purchase. Maybe they found your competitor much more accommodating and welcoming, discovering a rewarding experience. It goes beyond first-time buyers—coupons can fetch repeat purchases and keep customers coming back to your store.

Beyond one-off conversions or boosting sales, coupons gradually propel you towards your key business goals—reducing churn, increasing CLV (customer lifetime value, and fostering a strong brand relationship. Over time, this turns loyal customers into passionate brand advocates.

Now that you have a clear understanding of the pain points your coupon marketing strategy should address, let’s dive deeper into how to implement it effectively.

12 eCommerce Coupon Marketing Strategies to Unclock Flexible Growth

Let’s talk now! Bring in the following coupon marketing strategies to stuff your pipeline with revenue, lower abandoned cart rates, increase customer lifetime value, and take your average NPS (net promoter score) through the roof.

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 extra costs or hidden charges like shipping costs, tax, handling, packaging charges, etc.

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.

But you can turn this around by using discount coupons. You can offer discount coupons to spenders who cross profit margins. Use these to eliminate the great cart abandonment triggers for big spenders or frequent buyers. These convincer coupons will multiply your checkout rate and revenue.

2. Exchange Discount Coupons with Feedback

Businesses evolve like humans! You can’t survive today with a strategy you followed a couple of decades back. And so you need a feedback.

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.

Offering a feedback coupon has threefold benefits for you—feedback chances, repeat purchases, and satisfied customers.

3. Automate Personalized Coupons to Specific Segments

eCommerce personalization doesn’t end with the customer’s name or birthday.

You have to make your offers based on your customer’s demographics, psychographics, pain points, and buying behavior; and then automate personalized coupons for targeted segments.

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: BIRTH35MARCH – 35% 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. 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. Apart from last-minute discounts, you can initiate an early-bird sale, especially for your subscribed customers just like Amazon Prime Day Sale.

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.

You can find ample tools and features on the HubSpot CRM, such as landing page builder, website popup, and CTA builder to entice and convert your visitors.

6. Use A Blend of Distribution Channels

The best part of creating and distributing coupons is that they can be promoted anywhere and everywhere.

Yes, although, the traditional method of sharing coupon codes via email is still very much powerful. The more your coupons reach the end users, the better the chances of getting more leads. And, social channels like Facebook, Instagram, Telegram channels, Discord channels, etc can ease the final checkout with better reach.

Analyze and find the right social platform for your coupons. Where does your audience spend most of their time? Employ that platform. But also combine the preferred platform with other channels to share the benefits of coupons for customers.

Prefer using a centralized system for branding, consistency, tracking, and management, if you finalize multiple social platforms. Here, it’s ideal to deploy tools like HubSpot social media manager.

7. Offer Tempting Discounts to Insiders

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

You can offer some special discount coupons to your existing members. It’ll reward your existing members and make them feel it was worth subscribing to.

On top of that, these discount coupons will tell your non-members why they should subscribe. Eventually increasing your subscription rate. Simply put, it’s a win-win for you.

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 grasp. 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 for such products can be a critical situation; asking for losses or discontinuation of the product set.

Automated Coupons by MakeWebBetter

The most accommodating solution to such cases is either category-specific discount coupons or putting them as upselling offers.

Upselling less-selling items is a common practice and pairing them with percentage discount coupons up to 10% or 15% makes it achievable to have recurrent sales without heavy promotions.

10. Encourage Your Customers to Spend More

If you read carefully, I said earlier that coupons have many more significant applications 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.

Also, you might have seen that sometimes when you’re almost ready to checkout, you get a notification as, “You’re only $29 away from a 15% discount on your entire order!”.

You can trigger such workflows within HubSpot CRM and automate such discount coupons in a centralized manner. Further in this, we’ll explore how to leverage HubSpot CRM for coupon marketing automation.

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. 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.

Coupon Marketing Tools—How to get started?

So far, we know that alongside generating and distributing coupons—a coupon marketing strategy is more about delivering a personalized brand experience that addresses unique customer pain points. And to do that effectively, you need the right tools.

Let’s just get straight to the point—what tools will get the job done?

A robust CRM like HubSpot and an integrated platform to automate personalized coupons generation are must-haves.

Are you familiar with HubSpot? It’s a game-changer! It keeps you ahead with cutting-edge technologies like AI, generative AI, predictive analytics, and automation, all while delivering a seamless experience across marketing, sales, service, and support—perfectly aligned with your internal operations.

To deliver right, you can leverage rich HubSpot tools and features—segmentation, marketing campaign builder, email marketing, Ads, website pop-ups, workflow automation, and lots more to automate personalized coupons delivery.

When you automate personalized coupons distribution in HubSpot with custom triggers, you get exactly what a coupon marketing strategy needs.

HubSpot Automated Coupons Integration By MakeWebBetter

Automated Coupons by MakeWebBetter packs every couponing essential you can think of. This HubSpot coupon solution is built by MakeWebBetter, a HubSpot Elite Solution Partner, with over 10 years of HubSpotting.

The app lets you customize coupon rules, automate personalized coupons distribution, and unique coupon generation. Plus, the Automated Coupons app facilitates an integrated environment within HubSpot for frictionless coupon marketing automation.

This app comes with a built-in WooCommerce connector and supports custom integration for other eCommerce frameworks and custom-built websites as well.

You can install this app from the HubSpot marketplace or access it directly. Getting started is simple:

1. Connect your HubSpot account and WooCommerce store (or request a store connection).
2. Create a coupon rule in the app and set up a HubSpot workflow for automated coupon generation and distribution.

Once set, coupons will be generated automatically based on your defined rules—seamless, efficient, and fully integrated.

Key Automated Coupons Features

Here are some amazing functionalities brought to you in this app:

• Automate Personalized Coupons Generation & Distribution
• Coupon Formatting & Styling for supporting Dynamic Coupon text
• Defined Coupon Rules for Automated Coupon Generation
• Redemption Rules For Product-Specific
• Coupon Campaigning with Category & Brand Restriction Rule
• Expiry & Usage Criteria for FOMO Tactics
• Assists HubSpot Automation for Coupon Distribution

All Summed Up!

Pro Tip: Don’t overdo the discount coupons when formulating your coupon marketing strategies. Keep experimenting your coupon emails with HubSpot A/B Testing feature.

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.

Did you find space for refinement in the above-discussed strategies? Please feel free to share and educate fellow readers.