Top Coupon Delivery Channels – How to Send Coupons to Customers?

In the consumer-centric world, you need to provide a seamless customer experience regardless of channel or device. The same is true for sharing coupons with your customer base. Follow this article to see how to effectively send coupons to customers, what channels to use, and finally how to combine principles of omnichannel marketing with your coupon strategy. 

What is omnichannel marketing?

You might ask what omnichannel marketing is. It’s a true buzz word of digital marketing but the concept behind it is quite simple. In a nutshell, an omnichannel marketing strategy uses all available channels and customer touchpoints that create one, seamless customer experience that supports a real-time dialogue with all customers interacting with your brand. With today’s technology, brands can easily register customer’s responses to messages and decide about the next best actions. 

As coupons continue to be one of the most effective ways of driving sales, using multiple channels to send special deals to costumers is a much-needed boost to any coupon strategy. Coupons are a key motivating factor driving quick purchase decisions. If someone has been on the fence about buying, a 20% discount delivered to a mobile device or email inbox may be just enough to get them to make up their minds.

What channels can you use to send codes and discounts to customers?

1. Email distribution

Emails are still the most effective marketing medium once you can turn them into personal, well-targeted offers. Remember that personalization is far more than just a name in a subject line and a coupon code inside. You also need dynamic segmentation and automation to generate hundreds of tailored messages that match customer profile, recent activity, and circumstances and send them at the right time and proper context.

How to succeed with email coupon distribution?

• Define your marketing goals and what you would like to achieve by combining email marketing with coupons.
• Create a database of customer's email addresses. If you don't have enough addresses to work with, you can run a quick sign-up campaign to encourage more registrations.
• Split clients into segments based on spending habits, personal traits, or preferences.
• Create customized coupon campaigns with multiple values, types, and limits.
• Combine a personalized email message with a targeted coupon.

2. SMS

SMS is the best choice once you reinforce your strategy with geofencing and geo-oriented coupons. Using geolocation increases the chances of catching a customer in the right place at the right time. Sending coupons via SMS is a fantastic way to create a sense of intimacy between your brand and consumers. Moreover, with incentive-based mobile marketing you get to use the channel that has noted a rapid growth yet remains fairly cheap (average 0.75$/impression for mobile ads) and accessible for growing brands. 

Read more about mobile-first promotions.

3. Push notifications

Push notifications with coupons can successfully empower customer service. As e-commerce goes mobile, in-app notifications are an effective form of communication with your audience. According to recent data, 25% of consumers engage in online shopping only via mobile. You can use quick notifications with coupons to keep your customers informed about current deals and improve your customer service. The effort put into customer care is much more beneficial than care about sales itself. In the era of the internet, when almost everyone is connected, notifications are not only an easy but also cheap way to reach an enormous group of consumers.

4. Ads with coupons

The world of ads is tricky – it’s easy to pay for something that may never be noticed but costs a lot, as often happens with social media ads. This is why it may be worth using more creativity and new ideas in order to start advertising your brand. Well-targeted coupon campaigns make ads more reliable and noticeable wherever you put them. With attractive discounts wrapped into catchy campaigns, your ads get a proper chance to compete with the market giants who occupy the best places in social media and AdWords.

5. Social media

The marketing power of social media is undeniable. Although giant brands have dominated the world of social ads in the same way they rule Google AdWords, small and middle-size businesses still have a chance in this race. To stand out from the crowd, use creative and personalized ideas:

• Update your social profiles with personalized and tailored coupon deals.
• Launch a social media group for your customers to let them build relationships and share opinions.
• Ask for reviews of your products/services and reward the most active buyers.
• Create a movement – use coupons to encourage your buyers to share photos with your products or to check-in when they shop in your store. With time, you’ll be able to define some behavioral patterns typical for your audience and use them to improve a sales strategy or your customer service.
• And finally, be on! People very often ask for help or offers they are interested in by using their social profiles. If you decide to start with social media marketing, you need to be prepared for questions round-the-clock.
  

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6. Influencers

Influencer outreach pays off and increases ROI if you can effectively secure your brand against fraud. The huge power of influencers’ outreach quickly became a source of a growing number of misuses. By sharing vouchers with influencers, you can emphasize your marketing message and avoid fraud at the same time. Unique incentives provide your campaigns with detailed tracking of influencer’s interactions during the whole campaign, so there is no need to worry about fraud and you can focus on choosing the right influencers.

The good news is that there is a chance for small companies as well, you don’t have to spend lots of money and search far away to find the best influencers. If you put yourself in the consumers’ shoes, whose opinion would you value the most? Of course, other consumers’ who are already familiarized with your products. Opinions from your customers can firstly be displayed on your blog, landing page, or app (testimonials), and then you can ask customers to share your content on their social profiles or blog and offer a special coupon in response, sounds good?

7. Coupon aggregators & affiliates

When considering large scale marketing campaigns, implementation across a distributed organization that spans multiple business partners may easily become the elephant in the room. Collaboration with coupon websites is a great way to increase coupon sales but it has to be well-planned and secured by building an appropriate distribution network. You have to provide automatic coupon management and maintain it with an overview of current campaigns’ performance. 

8.Printed coupons

You can promote your coupons via flyers, newspapers, or even displayed on a shop counter – especially if your target group is not all digital natives. While searching the web, you can find many inspiring examples of coupon campaigns, such as the Marina Auto Body campaign, where company owners have used Starbucks coupons to thank their customers. What’s inspiring here is that they wrote and signed up handmade thanks and added them to each coupon.

9. Pop-ups and web channels

Should you display pop-ups on your web page? Yes, you should. Should you add a coupon to a pop-up? Yes, of course. But primarily, you have to be sure your pop-up is done right. If you take care of an appropriate incentive (nice coupon) it will be enough to make a pop-up attractive for your visitor – there is no need to dazzle users with a big, flashy box. If your pop-ups disturb users, they’re very likely to leave your site and never come back. When you already have a nice pop-up, the best practice is running tests which estimate which places and discounts bring the best results.

10. Co-marketing

“Co-marketing is about sharing audiences and resources between two complementary brands to execute a campaign that neither one could do as effectively alone.”

Why co-marketing? If you step out of your market, you’ll find many companies that target a similar audience. Affiliate programs don’t have to be only about sales, indeed, by cooperating, both brands get access to new clients. Coupons can be a great beginning to encourage a foreign audience to try your products/services.

How to start with an effective coupon distribution strategy?

With modern technology, you can be sure that appropriate coupon software will cover your omnichannel communication needs entirely, without harming your budget. Here are a few things you should take care of to make sure that your coupon distribution strategy works:

• Integrate your existing infrastructure (CRM) with a coupon platform (e.g., Voucherify).
• Begin by running small messaging experiments with different coupon formats, values, and limits to find out what works best. 
• Top it off by launching a full-scale campaign and use multiple integrated channels to deliver codes to customers. 
  

The initial preparation of your team for omnichannel software solutions and new coupon sharing channels is vital to make them efficient in the future. Today’s technology offers immersive possibilities but only if you learn how to use them first, and fit them into your kind of business.

How to measure the coupon distribution channel effectiveness?

By using a dedicated coupon software, you can get your hands on detailed redemption statistics with channel attribution for some quick insights. If you would like to keep your costs low, for now, you can also use less sophisticated methods of analytics – asking customers directly where they saw your coupon and what they liked or disliked about it. 

Keep in mind to never overuse coupons to drive sales. If your discounts last forever, your brand risks being associated with lower quality and your campaigns with a cheap marketing ploy. Target customers at times of increased spending (e.g., holiday season) and reach them across multiple channels to increase your chances of success.‍

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