Online coupons are a great way to increase sales. There are some interesting ways that coupons can be used to bring in traffic and increase sales.
The following are some ways to use online coupons.
Selling One-Time-Only Products
Set up your coupon codes and announce that particular products will only be available for a short amount of time. The only way they can grab them is with the use of the code. This is a sales tactic called “scarcity” and it works very well. I would just suggest that you don’t employ false scarcity, as in “there are only x amount of copies of this product available”, unless you actually plan to limit the amount of that product. You don’t want to destroy your customers’ trust in you.
Pre-Launches of Products
You can use coupon codes to give exclusive discounts to people that take advantage of your pre-launch offers. You tell them the code is only valid during that pre-launch period and that the price will dramatically increase after the actual launch. This creates that same scarcity that helps generate sales quickly.
Online Contests
You could run a contest with the prize being a free product. Only people that use the coupon will be eligible for the contest. It’s always good to give the “losers” of your contest some sort of consolation prize. You could make it so that the people that don’t win can still get the product at a certain discount. You will need to check local laws about any restrictions with implementing this or other contests.
Scavenger Hunts
Why not set up some kind of online scavenger hunt where customers find coupons to various products that you will sell at a discount. You can team up with other website owners. This alone can create a lot of traffic to your website.
Online Quizzes
Create quizzes with topics related to your products or services. The closer participants get to 100% correct, the higher discounted coupon they receive. A variation is to only give a coupon for 100% correct answers. You will need to decide if you want to allow participants multiple tries or if it is only a one-time use. Another option is to randomly generate the questions so that participants won’t take the same quiz twice.
Mobile Location-Based Couponing
This flies in the face of privacy issues with Google but nonetheless, it is still a growing trend. Vendors use geo-targeting to determine what stores customers are in and flood their smartphones with deals. Statistics show that customers seemed to be less concerned with the privacy issues when the deals are really good.
Your Own Custom Search Engine Pages
What you do is create a page (or multiple pages) with all of your coupon codes and add in some text that would contain search terms that people would likely search for your products. Make the text relevant so that you don’t get penalized from the search engines for keyword spamming your pages. A good idea would be to list each product, a short keyword rich description, the coupon code, and a link to the product page.
These are just a few ideas of how you can market your business using coupons. Brainstorm some ways that will fit with your business!
