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Coupons are an extremely smart way to attract more people to your website and get them to shop with you.  They have been around for some time now and have achieved stupendous results for businesses that have been able to use them smartly.  If you have been hesitant in using coupons to boost your business, reading this post might just change your mind.

In this post we make a strong case as to why your online business should make use of coupons.  We also give you four ideas to help you implement this coupon strategy.  So let’s get the ball rolling!

 

Coupons Generate Greater Consumer Interest

Everybody loves a discount.

This is human psychology 101.

Bombard people with posters, advertisements, and emails talking about your latest product and how awesome it is and it will generate some interest.  But throw in a discount or two and it will generate double interest.  This also works for products that aren’t anything special, new, or weren’t able to garner much interest before you introduced a price cut.

Now, coupons aren’t exactly a price cut on individual items, but a collective discount to be applied on your entire purchase.  It works out to be the same; in fact, coupons have even bigger power to draw people to your commercial website because they are applied to bigger costs and are deemed to lead to larger savings.

 

Coupons Generate Repeat Business

We are all familiar with this situation.  We visit our favorite online retailer and fill our cart with a number of things.  Not only do we get a discount if we shop for a certain amount, but are also promised a cashback or discount coupon for when we visit them next.  But we must do so within a month.

Well, the latter part is a bummer.  Personally, I don’t care for the websites who insist too much on giving out short-lived coupons or discounts to have me rushing back to them when I have just spent a couple of hundred dollars shopping with them.  On the other hand, websites with long-standing coupons are certainly my favorites.  Some of them have a coupon waiting for me whenever I visit them.  Needless to say, they are the beneficiaries of most of my shopping dollars!

 

Coupons Make People Spend More

Now this is slightly debatable, and I certainly don’t have the statistics to back this claim.  But it is general knowledge that people end up buying more in sales than they do otherwise, and that is the reason we have so many sales (all year round) in the first place.

Same goes for coupons.  Offer coupon discounts to be applied on a minimum purchase and the idea of getting something for less is so appealing to consumers that they will buy it thinking it’s a bargain, even if otherwise they had no interest in purchasing those items.

Advertising sometimes makes people buy what they don’t want to buy, and discounts make people buy that right now.  That’s how powerful the effect of discounts and coupons is.

And it doesn’t even have to be all about impulse buying.  Coupons hold a great lure even for smart shoppers who like to do their research first and then buy items at best prices.  So introducing coupons is a win-win for your online business.

 

Everybody is Doing it, Too

Well, fortunately or unfortunately you need to pay attention to what your competitors are up to.  Many spaces in the retail world, almost all of the big ones, have jumped onto the coupon bandwagon.  And as we just mentioned, coupons help bring in repeat business.

Given this scenario, you think you can afford to keep ignoring the power of coupons?  Not unless you’re a luxury retailer whose limited products get sold entirely on word of mouth.

 

4 Great Coupon Ideas for Your Business

Now that we have convinced you of the awesome power of coupons, it’s time to look at how you can inculcate them into your business.

 

1)  Use Twitter to Publicize Your Coupons

The first challenge is to get people to your website to find out that you have offers for them they cannot refuse.

This can be accomplished via social media, and Twitter in particular.  Anybody who has ever shopped with you, request them to ‘like’ you or ‘follow’ you on social media.  That’s a great first step since retweets on Twitter or suggestions on Facebook will advertise your business and coupons to the friends and followers of those who are following you on social media.

 

2)  Be Generous with Coupon Offers

Don’t make your customers wait endlessly to take advantage of another discount offer.  We are all for coupons that last for a given duration, but you need to make sure that you give out plenty of coupons.  They don’t all need to be of similar duration or discounts, but you need to make sure that there aren’t long gaps between your offers.  After all, people have full-time jobs and aren’t always free to check out what their favorite retailers are up to.  If your coupon offers take forever to come up, people might just lose interest in you and move on to other business that don’t keep them waiting for so long.  Reward customers who shop with you regularly.

 

3)  Mix up Your Coupons

This is a particularly good idea for businesses that sell a variety of things.  One week you offer coupons for beauty products purchases, the other day for low-calorie foods, and so on.

For those who only sell one thing, you can experiment with the price limits of discounts and durations of coupons.  You can also club a few items together and introduce group-specific coupons.

 

4)  Outsmart Your Competition

So your biggest rival in town is offering iPhone 5s covers at $40 a piece?  Do them one better and peg your items at $38.99.  If you can’t do that, introduce a coupon for future purchases with each mobile accessory purchase of $100.  The idea is to use coupons as a strategic weapon to give users more value than what they’d find elsewhere.