Tips & Tricks: getting creative with coupons

Electronic coupons are a great marketing tool.

Most (good) small biz e-commerce software includes a bunch of features to create and manage electronic coupons (or "discount codes").

You can use them in a variety of ways to promote higher and more frequent purchases on your online store. Remember, there are two great ways to increase sales without acquiring new customers (i.e. without incurring customer acquisition costs):

• increasing repeat purchases
• increasing the average purchase amount

A quick example that takes little time to setup: promote a repeat purchase by adding an electronic coupon to the Order Confirmation or Order Shipped email. The idea is obvious: "hey, come back to our store! Here's a 10% discount for your next purchase."

For a more targeted marketing campaign, you could restrict the coupon to a certain order amount and/or a certain category of products (e.g. "Come back to our store and buy at least $50, and here is $10 off" or "Come back and get 20% off our winter jackets!").

On my company's Web site we have a page that contains more examples of how to use electronic coupons creatively on your online store. You shopping cart provider might have done the same.

To do list:

• Review your shopping cart software's User Guide for details on electronic coupons
• Figure out what you can and cannot do and... push those features to the limit!
• Write down at least 5 ways to use an electronic coupon on your store
• Turn each idea into a marketing campaign!

Good luck, and let me know how it goes!