Offering coupons to your customers can seem like a easy tool to attract new and repeat customers. However, it’s important to make sure discounting fits into your overall sales strategy. Do not overuse coupons such that your customers come to expect them due to certain actions or inactions.

Lack of control and overuse of coupons can have a detrimental effect on your bottomline. Some of the main issues with online coupons are uncontrollable distribution, erosion of customer loyalty due to discount hunters, and reduction of average order value. However, strategic use of coupons can be beneficial.

There are multiple ways to use coupons in your ecommerce business. Consider each carefully. If you do decide to offer coupons to your customers (which we recommend), then MailBeez lets you better control your campaign efforts through the implementation of features that support static and personalized coupon codes.

Coupon Basics

Static coupon codes are generic codes that can be redeemed multiple times by any number of customers. Usually a static coupon uses a single coupon code with no or few restrictions. To redeem the coupon, all that is needed is the coupon code. Once the code has been distributed e.g. via email, there is not much you can do to control the proliferation of the coupon (viral effect). The unintended consequences can be a coupon that is used many times by the same customer, or redeemed more times than you initially intended.

These issues can be addressed, in part, with personalized, limited use coupon codes. Rather than releasing a single coupon code to everyone, you can create individual codes for each customer.

Advantages of Personalized Coupons

In comparison to static coupon codes, there are a number of advantages to using personalized coupons:

• No unwanted viral effect: You can configure exactly how often a coupon can be applied
• Create sense of urgency due to expiry date: Each generated coupon has an expiry date, e.g. 14 days starting with the day the coupons was sent. The expiry date creates a sense of urgency, leading to more orders. In addition, you can utilize the Coupon Expiry Reminder to send a reminder email a couple of days before the expiry date - great for conversion!
• Traceability: MailBeez can connect the coupon code to the receiving customer including the email it was sent with. This allows better insight into the effectiveness of your coupons, and specific emails. MailBeez Analytics Advanced allows you to drill down and evaluate each of your coupon campaigns.

MailBeez Coupon Engine

The MailBeez Coupon Engine is a sub-module which lets you configure personalized coupons, and can be utilized by any MailBeez module that supports the generation of coupons.

The Coupon Engine allows you to create personalized coupons that can be sent to specific customers or as part of any email campaign. Personalized coupons offer a number of advantages that result in better control over your coupon offers. Click to earn more about Coupon Engine.

Be sure to also checkout other ways to use coupons with MailBeez Coupon Recipes: