subject: A Coupon Lesson From Grocers For Your Ecommerce Store [print this page] Even though the online retail world has made enormous changes in the way that business gets done, there are some strategies from the bricks and mortar world that can be easily and profitably adopted in the ecommerce world as well.
You probably already know that coupons are a huge draw both offline and online. According to Comscore, a leading marketing intelligence data collection service, '27 million US Internet users visited coupon sites in October 2008, up 33 percent from a year earlier (that is 18 percent of the 148 million Americans who use any coupons in a year). The number of searches conducted using coupon terms also increased by 100 percent from January to September of 2008. On a global basis, there was a 42 percent increase in the number of pages viewed at coupon sites.'
Hopefully you have already implemented a coupon strategy on your own site, including registering your coupon or coupons at one or more of the dozens of coupon consolidating sites available. If you have not read the latest research on coupon usage, you should know that you are better off providing a long redemption period. Even though basic sales strategy suggests that you close the gap between getting the coupon and taking the purchase action, the latest research says that many more coupons are redeemed if they are given about a nine month usage life.
Terrific, now that you have done that, you are ready for the second half of the coupon strategy: accept competitors coupons! This is a tried and true strategy in grocery stores, grocers encourage people to simply bring their fist full of coupons cut out from the newspaper and use them all in one store. This is especially helpful in this multi purchase setting because once someone has crossed the threshold, they will probably buy more than just those items that have associated coupons.
In the online situation, since you cannot necessarily count on the overall boost to sales, you need to do a bit of analysis before you adopt this strategy.
You need to be sure that you can still do okay at the lower pricing. If your competitors coupons are at about the same discount as yours, no problem at all. If they are much more substantial, either they are buying a lot less expensively, they do not know how to manage themselves or they are desperate to get people to their site for more business (possibly because of an inventory problem).
Obviously, if the discounting is too substantial for you to make money, this is not a good strategy for you, although you may want to try for a limited time and see how that group of buyers works out, e.g., do they buy more or return frequently making the initial discount worthwhile?
You can find competitor coupons by going to any of the coupon consolidator sites. Once you find them, add those codes to your shopping carts list of acceptable codes.
Then, advertise your policy. Send out a press release or make the policy part of your pay per click ads.
Finally, analyze the results to be certain that it is financially worthwhile to pursue this strategy.
by: Jane Dawson
welcome to Insurances.net (https://www.insurances.net)
