Promotions have always been a fundamental aspect of business success, and this is only becoming more the case as competition heats up. With ever-emerging eCommerce companies fighting for the hot spot, promotions hold power to both make and break business efforts.
As daunting as that can seem, it also provides an exciting opportunity to leave even your fiercest competitors in the dust. All you need to do is understand exactly which promotions are on offer, and what each can do for your company.
Too often, promotion is used as a blanket business term, but that’s often an oversimplification. In reality, understanding the ins and outs could see you utilising eCommerce offers that no one can object to. To help you achieve that, we’re going to consider the different promotions you’re facing, and how each can take your company further in 2020 and beyond.
What are promo codes?
Promo code is the term you’ll hear and use most often in your eCommerce-focused promotional efforts. Put simply, a promo code is an alphanumeric sequence, often personalised, that consumers can use to redeem money off purchases online or in-store. Also commonly referred to as discount codes, voucher codes and coupon codes, businesses can either send codes like these directly to consumers or implement them into QR barcodes and more. Promo codes traditionally take the form of either percentages or dollar amounts of money off and can apply to both individual purchases and complete orders.
In many ways, promo codes are the umbrella of the promotional world. They certainly offer an overarching promotional strategy, which is vital in an age where 75% of consumers expect some form of money off. In fact, 62% of consumers now state they won’t complete a purchase without it. Promo codes can help you to meet that need and boost your eCommerce business moving forward.
Coupons vs. Vouchers
Within and slightly separate to the promo code umbrella are coupons and vouchers. While each of these utilises promotional codes in different ways, understanding and testing each format is vital for finding techniques that work for your unique business model.
In and of itself, a promo code is incomprehensible and unusable. It’s only when paired with the visual representation of coupons and vouchers that these base codes develop meaning and value to customers. The question is, are you better off displaying promo codes through coupons or vouchers?
In reality, there’s no right answer here. The terms vouchers and coupons are mainly synonymous, and each can work in a business setting. That said, there are subtle differences between the two. While these aren’t always universal, understanding the basics can help you to choose the right method for your business needs.
- Discount vouchers typically pass from a retailer straight to consumers. Taking the form of emails, gift cards and even loyalty cards, vouchers can be used as rewards, compensation, and more. While mainly providing one-time discounts, vouchers tend to work on a depletion basis, encouraging repeat purchases if money remains.
- Coupons are typically distributed by either a marketing team or an independent reservation. Unlike the depletable nature of some vouchers, coupons tend to cover one-time purchases on food and drinks, retail items, and more. Unlike vouchers, many companies use online or printable coupons to attract new audiences. Much like offering a free sample, coupons work well for encouraging first-time purchases that lead to repeat custom.
Applying these differences to your bottom line
Once you understand the fundamental differences between vouchers and coupons and how promo codes fit within that, you can work to apply these methods to your business bottom line. First, you’re going to want to consider the different deliveries of each, and how you can implement them into your business efforts.
Vouchers are much easier to deal with in this sense because you already have a customer base to utilise through email and more. Still, you can hardly send a blank promo code. Instead, consider the different creative ways you can make use of artwork and personalisation within promotional emails or cards to dress vouchers in a way that both appeals and increases conversions.
Coupons generally involve a much broader reach. While presentation still matters, you also need to focus on marketing techniques that include social media efforts and connections with third-party sites. Engaging with influencers is also an invaluable tool here. By providing coupons for influencers to share with their audiences, you can enjoy the power of personalisation with audiences that are more likely to buy from you.
Implementing single-use codes
In the case of both coupons and vouchers, it’s also essential that you consider single-use codes instead of generic offerings. Single-use efforts can help you to eliminate promo code misuse on even your wide-scale coupon efforts by removing the risk of repeat purchases and ensuring only those you want to use your codes do. With an increased focus on personalisation, they can also impress and even evangelise your existing customer base which will help you reach a wider audience.
Single-use promotions of all kinds also make it easier for you to track customer response and promo code usage. This is the case whether you’re offering loyalty discounts or influencer codes, and can help you to perfect and tailor your efforts moving forward.
As if that weren’t enough, single-use promotions in both coupon and voucher strategies allow you to implement techniques like scarcity marketing, where diminishing or time-sensitive offers provide a much-needed incentive for conversions.
Technology and automation can help you make the most out of promotions
As you can see, promo codes can boost your profits however you choose to implement them. In fact, both can help you to appeal to a wider customer base. But unique codes are fundamental to that process. On the surface, this can seem like it will add a great deal to your workload, but that needn’t be the case.
Getting vouchers and coupons right primarily comes down to the technology you implement. Automated promo code generators can guarantee that you don’t even need to think about this process to succeed. This software will not only help you to generate a large number of unique single-use promo codes for your customer base, but also will help you monitor the effectiveness of the codes you offer. Analytics can help you evaluate the promo code campaigns you implement so that you can continually change and improve them.
These features then free you to focus on more creative aspects of your efforts such as artwork and distribution that can guarantee both coupons and vouchers get you a sizeable profit moving forward.
A Coupon code also known Discount Code, Promotional code or promo code in e-commerce and online shopping, is a computer-generated code, consisting of letters or numbers that consumers can enter into a promotional box on a site’s shopping cart or checkout page to allow the shopper to take advantage of a special offer or a discount on the current purchase discount. It is used to encourage purchases on their website and are typically associated with an overarching promotional marketing strategy.
Coupon code is an approach of supplying selected customers a bonus or reward in type of a discounted list prices as a way to entice customers to buy product/service online.
If you’re a buyer shopping online, before you enter the checkout, make sure that you look for coupon codes and take advantage of the discounts that are available when you choose to shop online.Types of Coupon Codes
Type of Coupon Code
There are three different types of promotional codes store owners can choose from.
- Private codes: online stores use this to target a specific group of people. Usually loyal customers for special shopping opportunities, such as first-time shoppers, private codes are a good way to bring in new customers.
- Public codes: anyone can see or use a public promo code. These are useful for enticing new customers and encouraging previous shoppers to come back for more.
- Restricted codes: this is targeted to a single user and can only be used once.
Four common ways in which Coupon codes are offered to customers
Most coupon codes offer discounts for online purchases such as a fixed cart discount, a percentage off the entire purchase, fixed product discount, free shipping or other discount as advertised by the seller. This marketing strategy essentially gives customers yet another reason to buy your products.
- Percent Discount: A percent discount takes a given percentage off a customer’s order, such as 5%, 10%, 20% or even as much as 50%. The percentage discount only applies to the cost of the purchase, and is not applied to any shipping charges or taxes.
- Fixed Cart Discount: This discount type offers customers a set dollar amounts off their purchase. In many cases the fixed cart purchase will be tied to a minimum purchase amount.
- Fixed Product Discount: This discount applies to specific items off your purchase. Once the product is to be purchased and the coupon is applied, there is a slash in the price.
- Free Shipping: This is a common incentive and is often combined with a minimum purchase. Typically, the free shipping offer will only apply to items shipped domestically or within the seller’s state or country.
Your conversion rate and traffic to your site increases when you offer discount codes on your website. Each discount code will be unique, and you will only be able to use it once.
Why Online Store like Printproducts.com.ng Offer Coupon Codes?
Online store or e-commerce like Printproducts.com.ng offer coupon codes as an incentive to shoppers who purchase on the website as these benefits both the customer and the business. We offer the coupon codes directly on the website, social media handles or offer member-only promotional codes in email newsletters.
Customers get the products they want for a lower price, and the e-commerce store generates revenue. One of the most useful things about promotional codes is that they work well with both new and returning customers. These incentives even have a direct impact on the overall shopping experience, according to research conducted by the Center for Neuroeconomics Studies at Claremont Graduate University.
“Getting a coupon, as hard as it is to believe, is physically shown to be more enjoyable than getting a gift,” said Paul J. Zak, director of the Center for Neuroeconomics Studies at Claremont Graduate University.
The study showed that people who received promotional codes had heightened levels of oxytocin, which is a hormone that creates feelings of happiness.
Steps to Purchase Online with a Coupon Code
1.Find a coupon code for the vendor and item you want to buy: This allows you to get the deal at the company’s online shopping site. If you haven’t done as previous purchase on the site, you can find coupon codes via an Internet search. Type “coupon code”, “promo code”, “discount code” or “voucher code” in the search string, along with a description of the company you want to buy from and/or the item you want to buy.
2. Access the shopping website where you want to buy something: Go through the website to select items to buy. As with picking out items off a shelf, this part of the process is identical to shopping without a coupon code.
3. Start the checkout process as normal for the site where you are shopping: Confirm that you are buying what you want, and that it fulfils any requirements to qualify for the promotion code you want to use.
4. Go through the checkout process: At each page, scan the page for a coupon code or promotion code option. This could be sent directly to your email address if you are a subscriber of their email newsletter, redeemed on their social media handles etc. The exact location of this option will vary from vendor to vendor.
5. Enter the coupon code from the deal you want to use in the appropriate box: Click the “Apply Coupon” or similar button on the checkout page. Some vendor sites will make this part of the regular checkout page, while others will direct you to a separate page to confirm your promotion or coupon code.
6. Scan your shopping cart to confirm that the coupon code was properly entered and is reflected in your total price. If not, navigate back through the checkout process and try again.
7. Proceed payment and finish the order
Assigning easy numbers and letters as coupon codes are very helpful, if a customer sees the promotion advertised in an email or on social media but doesn’t click through immediately, they’ll still be able to capture the code when needed.
Also, creating slightly different codes on various social media platforms like fakebook, Twitter, Instagram (SALESFB, SALESTW, SALESIG) can help with market evaluation. These different codes are with the same offer, it is only important as an indicator of where the customer saw the sale advertised.
How to Create a Coupon Code?
Online stores may allow customers to enter multiple promotional codes or limit customers to using only one code. While deciding how many codes a customer is allowed to use is up to you, it’s important to ensure the transaction is still profitable for you no matter what combination of codes are used. As a matter of ease, we will be using a WordPress website as an example.
1. Log into the back end of your website and follow the process below: Every online shop has an e-commerce plugin. The common one is WooCommerce, which is an open-source e-commerce plugin for WordPress.
Go to WooCommerce in your back end
2. The second step
3. Third Step
4. Fourth Step
5. Publish. You can publish immediately or later. To schedule, click on “Edit”, choose accordingly and save.
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