Coupons are changing fast and furiously these days thanks to new marketing approaches and evolving technology. Businesses and customers alike can sometimes struggle to keep up with the latest trends. However, knowing and embracing these trends can lead to more successful promotions for companies and better deals for buyers. Staying ahead of the curve requires a close look at how the digital world is impacting coupon creation. Check out these coupon trends and alternatives to paper coupons.
Coupon Trends – New Ways to Coupon
1. Simpler, Faster Coupon Deals: The more complex coupon deals of yesterday are falling to the wayside as customers speed up their shopping and purchasing decisions. In the world of debit cards, growing proximity payment systems, mobile shopping lists and similar solutions, people are buying faster than ever before, often with tight time deadlines in mind. As a result, stores are making their coupons easier to use than before, with basic scans or automatic loyalty program discounts. As a result, older tactics like doubling coupons are falling to the wayside in favor of clearer methods that make savings more obvious and easier to understand for both sides.
2. Digital Coupons: Digital coupons are coupons that can be found online, then printed out and taken into the store to use. This helps avoid any coupon cutting issues and can be time effective, but there are other reasons that stores and loyalty programs are moving onto this digital version. First, companies can offer PDFs and website versions of digital coupons without paying extra to place them in magazines or newspapers (or their online equivalents). Second, making customers like you access and print out the certificates is a great way to monitor who and how many are using the digital coupon option.
3. Social Coupons for Ecommerce: Social coupons are available on social networks like Facebook, or at least linked through social pages back to a company website. These social coupons have grown along with social media as a way to reach a vast number of people, specifically fans and followers, with minimal effort. These coupons typically function in the ecommerce world, offering promotions and discounts for online items rather than in-store goods.
4. Paperless Coupons: Paperless coupons have grown up along with smartphones. Today's phones allow companies to advertise discounts on apps and their mobile websites. Users can select a coupon and either download it to a specific digital wallet designed to hold e-coupons or access an online barcode. Then, when buying items in the store, shoppers simply allow their bar codes to be scanned from the phones. This avoids paper the whole way through and is a very speed option for the modern shopper. However, older coupon cutters have trouble getting accustomed to using their phones in this way. For stores that use proximity technology, bar codes are sometimes replaced entirely by signals.
5. QR Codes and Proximity Coupons: In this case, the coupon starts with a physical object but ends up on the phone. Scanning a particular QR code or nearing a particular kiosk, for example, brings up a coupon on the smartphone that can be immediately used to get a deal on that particular product. Stores like this option because it encourages customers to interact with the physical product and avoids app marketing, which they may not have much experience in.
6. Electronic Kiosk Options: This option is similar to the QR code version, but instead of requiring customers to use their smartphones it encourages them to interact with a kiosk in some way, such as emailing or printing a coupon.
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written by: Robert Langdon
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Image courtesy of Stuart Miles, FreeDigitalPhotos.net
