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How to Make Money Couponing

Do you want to increase market penetration, sell more product using coupons and grow your business? If YES, here are 7 easy steps on how to make money couponing. When it comes to making money off your business, the major key is to ensure that you are always generating ways you can keep customers interested in your brand. Over the years, businesses have given themselves to various interesting approaches to make sure more customers purchase their services.

Continuously redefining their approach in order to maintain consumer interest is one of the reasons major corporations have stayed in business for more than 20 years. When you look at certain brands that have exhibited great longevity, you tend to ask yourself what exactly they do to stay relevant for so long. Among many other principles these brands practice is the act of inciting customers to buy more through coupons.

Coupons are slips whether digital or printed that makes the costumer able to purchase a particular product or service at a discounted or rebated price. As you would imagine, such offers would definitely increase the purchasing desire of certain customers. These are some of the ways you can make money couponing.

How to Make Money Couponing

  1. Make sure you consistently follow up on the customers

The major way to make your money back after you engage in a couponing program is to ensure that you continue to market the product or service at all who purchased it by the coupon, but this time at the normal price. Other products and services you provide are not excluded from the follow up approaches.

Over time, your brand will begin to register in the minds of the customers until they continue to shop with you even at normal price. In the endeavor to use couponing as a means of landing the interest of new customers, one must know the types of people who would naturally go for offers like these.

When it comes to the types of people to reach out with your coupon exercise, the decision depends on the end purpose of your exercise. For example, if people of a certain age group are not responding to your brand, then you could use this approach to inspire interest in the product or service you offer.

2. Use the coupon half price to sell other products at full price

Use the option of offering a coupon discount on a particular product to sell another product at full price. That way, you get to attract your customer but still make full profits on the item you sold at full price. When you meet with your financial team and business developers for your brain storming session, they could identify products that will still give you the amount of money you gave away on the sale, if they were bought at full price.

That way you are not really making any kind of loss on your discount. For example, if an item goes for a lesser amount and another item goes for a higher amount, your coupon could offer the higher amount at full price while offering two of the lesser priced items at half price. Sort of like a buy one get two at half price type of coupon.

The trick behind it is, while consumers think they are making a deal on the other two items that are coming for free, they are actually still paying the full price with the original price of the item they would have bought. That way the business owner gets to create some type of general hype around the business without losing any money at all on giveaways.

3. Drive Sales during festive seasons

Whether it’s Christmas, New Year’s or Valentines, the truth is that seasons have a way of making people shop. Why not take advantage of this buzz to make customers purchase more items by offering coupon promotions on a few other items.

On a normal day, such promotional activity may seem to hurt revenues, but if you sell a certain product with certain percentages off, you will still make your profits if a large number of people buy that product at the price you are offering it, and they will because you are taking advantage of whatever season is being celebrated to generate more sales. In order to effectively do this, proper advertising has to be done to get the word out there.

Without developing a way to market the deals, nobody would know about it except those who are already used to the brand or business. Awareness should be loud and in the face of everyone who hears about your brand. In fact, it should be all that people talk about when they mention your brand during the time of the promotion.

Below are some of the strategies to use in drumming awareness for your coupon promotion exercise;

  • You can secure a billboard or banner around your target area that advertises your coupon deals
  • You can brand all official cars with the coupon promotional designs
  • Staff members can wear clothing with the coupon promotion brand advertised on it.
  • Encourage your loyal customers to spread the word about the coupon promotion
  • Use digital Marketing to boost the awareness of the couponing campaign.
  • Advertise your promotion on Television
  • Place your coupons slips in magazines, newspapers or other print materials that would eventually reach households or businesses.
  • Advertise your promotion on Radio
  • Advertise your promotion in Magazines or Newspapers
  • Attend events where your target audience would be and share your coupon fliers
  • Use marketers to engage direct distribution of the coupon slips as well as your business flier
  • Promote your coupon exercise on your own website

4. Use Free Trials to make gains

A free trial may seem like a great way for consumers to test drive certain products or services without paying. However, the major way to make money on the free trial deal is to place certain hidden charges when the customer decides to make the purchase at full price.

This could work both for services and products alike, the general idea is that during the time when the customer enjoys the free trial, they get fully convinced about the product and will already make a decision to continue purchasing such products.

5. Engage first time customers

Money is made in the long run when it comes to first time customer’s coupon promotion. The first-time customers are encouraged to continue to shop with the retail outlet because of this very interesting offer. However, over time as the customer continues to make that particular retail outlet their go to place for shopping, whatever was lost during the initial first-time shopper coupon promotion can be gained.

This also falls back to the first idea of maintaining some type of follow up endeavor on those who shop for the first time. The follow up activity helps to make shopping in that retail outlet stick more in their minds.

And everyone has the tendency to tell their friends about the experience, so this means more people are going to be looking into showing up for the first time so they too can benefit from this offer. But then they too will become loyal customers if effective follow up is done by the customer care team.

6. Loyal customers Coupons

Getting loyal customers to shop more in order to qualify for certain discounts, giveaway’s and other promotional packages is a great way to drive general sales within the retail shop. Whatever may be perceived as lost due to the discounts the loyal customers would have gained at the end of their purchase, would be made by the business in the long run.

So, the truth is, there are really no discounts when you come to think about it. The customer would have to shop for a certain amount to receive discount on select items that would have already been paid for by their previous shopping habits.

The idea of the rewards would give the loyal customers a sense of achievement and the feeling that they will save a few bucks when they reach the desired criteria but the truth of the matter is, they wouldn’t have made any savings at all. When the accountants balance the sheet in the long run, they just made the customer shop with them and make more sales faster than they would have done without the coupon promotion.

List of Personnel You Need to Successfully Execute a Coupon Promotion

a. The Accountant or Financial Team

When engaging your coupon program, you would need all members of your staff on board. They would have to be informed on the various terms and conditions of the coupon deals the shop has to offer.

The first set of people to be involved in coupon programs should be accountants or financial team within the business. They need to be able to say whether the deals offered in the coupon will serve the desired purpose at the end of the day. They make up some of the most important people when it comes to coupon programs, they know the numbers and how it is supposed to work.

b. The Customer Service Personnel

Another set of people needed to effectively execute this exercise are the customer service personnel. They will be speaking with customers on the coupons and deals, so they need to be well informed on the various offers available. Should an attendant not have the right information for a customer, the attendant should be able to direct the customer to the person who will eventually give them the right information they need.

c. The Marketers and Business Developers

The marketers and business development team would have to be in the know and have very in-depth knowledge of the offers being made and how they can be redeemed by the customer. In fact, it should be the work of the marketers to make these offers available to those customers who naturally wouldn’t have heard about it. Their jobs would be developing strategies of creating proper awareness for the coupon exercise.

d. IT Professionals

If you are running a digital couponing exercise then your web developer and IT Professional would have to be fully informed and would have to develop the digital framework through which these digital coupons would be redeemed or used to receive the promise of the offer.

Some Important Facts You Must Know When Couponing;

  • Competing with coupon promotions of rival brands

The basic way to beat your competition on the coupon strategies is to make sure you know what the competition is offering. Better deals are the way to go, however make sure that in your effort to make better deals, you do not run into the trouble of engaging your promo at a loss.

You don’t want to end up losing out on revenue because you are trying to beat a competitor. But if your major aim is to eventually crush the competition so as to keep your sales frequency up in spite of the competition, then you can go ahead.

Keep in mind that you should have another strategy of recovering revenue after the promo is over. Go through brainstorming sessions with your team of marketers or business developers and financial people and develop promotions that will beat the competition whenever they pose a threat with their own promotional offers.

  • Threats to Couponing as a Retail Outlet or Manufacturer

One of the major threats of engaging in couponing program is the fear of loss of revenue after so many items are sold at a discounted price or after certain other incentives are used. The rationale behind such idea is sound, however such an experience usually happens if the retailers failed to look into the original financial status of the items in question to know if discounts will actually help sales in the end or cause for sales to drop.

Another threat to the couponing program could be a reduced value the customers may have of a particular brand if they are always being sold at a discounted rate. Certain customers may begin to look at the product as through it was not really worth its original price, hence decide to not purchase it at the original price except during some type of promotional exercise.

One other threat to a coupon program could be what the competition is offering. Sometimes the competition may have an even more attractive offer on the same set of items making one’s offer seem weak.

Some businesses have decided to stay away from the entire couponing strategy and sell all their products at a slightly discounted rate. This way no particular product is seen to have any kind of issues, meaning that the unique selling point of such brands would be that one can always get their items there at a reduced rate all the time.

There are a few practices to deliberately avoid when deciding to utilize the coupon strategy in driving sales. You must avoid making discounts and coupon programs your sole means of marketing your store. The challenge with this is that many of your customers would begin to wait until there is some type of coupon available for some of the items or products they may need.

The challenge with this is that many regular customers may change into coupon addicts and this would have a negative effect on your bottom line. In conclusion, before you start couponing as a business, you would need to do a research into the cost of generating your product or service, marketing it and delivering on your products.

This will give you a very clear insight into what initializing a promotion like this will do for your business. It may seem that making discounts and promotional activities will always be a great decision, sometimes it may not. One may actually loose more during a promotional activity if proper research was not done.

Having this in mind, you now know that simply using coupons because of how popular it is or because your competition is using it, is not a very good idea. Do your research and make sure your objectives will be achieved by the process.