Coupons fall in the category of a pull promotional activity. This means they are trying to change the behaviours of the customer to encourage them to use the product more frequently or in different ways to result in increased sales.
Coupons possess many advantages, the first major one being their ability to be tracked back to a specific campaign, medium, copy and discount; all of which can be tracked individually (Steimer 2018).
The effectiveness of coupons are expressed by Steimer (2018) with two key statistics; 65% of consumers say online voucher codes often sway their purchase decisions if they are undecided; 91% of coupon redeemers say they will purchase from a retailer again if they are offered a coupon.
This expresses the effectiveness of coupons for both retention and increasing new customers. Coupons are undoubtedly very effective for customers who a price sensitive.
Using the metric ‘percentage sales of coupons’ allow an organisation to measure the effectiveness of coupons. Once their effectiveness is known, this allows more accurate targeting of future campaigns and the ability to see the organisations dependency on coupons and whether they are missing out on any profits by offering too many coupons.
References
Bendle, NT, PW Farris, PE Pfeifer & DJ Reibstein (2016) Marketing Metrics: The Manager’s Guide to Measuring Marketing Performance, 3rd edition. Pearson: New Jersey.
Steimer, Sarah (2018) “How and why marketers should use coupon codes” Marketing News (12-March-2018).
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