The Benefits of Offering Online Coupons for Your Business

Any stat you look at nowadays, you’ll find that coupon usage is way up from previous years – more specifically, online coupons.

For consumers, it’s easy to understand why coupons have been used more widely and often:

• Coupon codes makes it convenient to save while shopping online.
• Consumers have easier access to online coupons – from newsletters, to social media and coupon sites.
• People love to save money.
• Allows consumers to test out new products without having to pay full price.

Here are interesting stats from VerticalResponse/VoucherCloud:

• The use of coupons during a shopping experience has risen from 63% to 92% in just the past five years, and a lot of this growth has been driven by online coupons.
• 93% of coupon users say they’ll be very likely to use a coupon they receive in an email.
• Not only has their access to coupons grown significantly, but how they fulfill them has changed as well. It’s estimated that 74.1 million consumers will use their smartphone and 68.7 million will use their tablet to present their coupon to a business.
• The vast majority of coupon users say that they’ll visit a retailer again because of being offered a coupon.
• More than half said they would not have made that purchase unless they had a coupon.

We understand why consumers love coupons. Now, here are a few reasons why businesses benefit by offering coupons:

• Great way to attract new customers to check out your product or service.
• You may not make money upfront, but if you are able to retain those customers, you can make money in the long-run.
• You can build your email subscriber list. By offering coupon codes periodically, you can grow your traffic and repeat customers.

Coupons are a form of marketing – an investment. Regardless of how you think of it, at the end of the day, you are promoting your business using coupons. It doesn’t cost any money to setup coupons, but you are making less money with each sale that uses a coupon.

You may end up making less money with coupons in the beginning, but think of the long term benefits… greater exposure, a bigger email list and a bigger customer base.