Clip, Clip – Do Coupons Have a Future in Direct Marketing in 2015?

So, you thought coupon-clipping went out with the Sunday newspapers delivered to your door for reading over breakfast, didn’t you? Wrong! That might be the image that pops into your head when the word is mentioned, but a recent report from Experian Marketing Services shows that coupons are still a direct marketingdrawcard—even in the digital marketing world.

Digital Coupons

The report details how today’s coupons sent by email, SMS, MMS, push notifications and other digital channels are achieving a 14% higher open rate than promotional messages without coupons. And that’s not all; digital coupons also get 34% more unique clicks, 27% more transactions and boost revenue per email by 48% against other promotional email formats.

So What’s Different?

First, digital coupons are cross-channel—more so than their physical counterparts can ever be. Whether the offer arrives via email, mobile alert, Facebook or even SnapChat, as long as it arrives your customer can use it.
Second, the coupons are customized. Thanks to the availability of client data, you can now create direct marketingcampaigns that closely target your ideal customer, right down to offering him a personalized offer for a product he viewed last week.
You might not be calling these offers “coupons” but it’s possible you’re already mining your data for these purposes.

Looking to the Future

If you’re still thinking of coupons in the traditional sense, it’s definitely time to broaden your horizons. With the Experian report showing an increase of 50% year-over-year in the number of email marketing campaigns that go out with coupons, there’s little doubt that there’s a future for couponing in 2015.

Flexibility

One of the main advantages of using digital coupons in direct marketingis the flexibility across different types of products and services, according to the Direct Marketing Association. It’s not just retail that can benefit from coupons, but the service industry can use them too. And the types of unique identifiers that can be used are also varied, ranging from alphanumeric codes, through barcode to QR codes or even images.

Added Benefits

The additional advantages of using identifiers on digital coupons are:

– it costs nothing extra to personalize them for a direct marketing campaign, like it does with printed coupons

– you can measure performance down to knowing exactly which recipients make use of their coupons, what they buy and when they buy it

– you can retarget those who don’t use them, because your records show they haven’t done so

– all reporting is done digitally, so there’s no labor cost involved in delivering the statistics.

Don’t write off coupons as old hat just yet. There may still be life left in the old practice, although the tools used to preserve them change shape on a regular basis.