Customer Engagement in Coupon Marketing

In the late 19th century, a new beverage was struggling to compete against more popular brands on the market. That’s when its owner came up with a breakthrough idea to distribute vouchers that can be exchanged for a free glass of the beverage. Today, the beverage from the 19th century is known worldwide under the same title – Coca-Cola. That was the first documented case of coupon marketing. Ever since then this marketing tactic has helped thousands of businesses to increase customer awareness and engagement as well as boost conversions and retention.

As businesses rapidly transitioned to online operations, his tactic has been successfully adopted in digital marketing. Today, the Digital Coupons Market Size is growing at 7.84% CAGR and is projected to reach $200B in 2032. It’s a clear sign to businesses: coupons are working and should be adopted in your marketing strategy.

Digital Coupon Market Growth (Actual and Projected) 2018-2032

This article will help you get answers to the following questions:

• What is coupon marketing?
• What are the main types of coupons?
• How to build a coupon marketing strategy?
• What are the best practices?
• How can you enhance your coupon marketing with gamification?

There’s a lot to unpack here, so let’s begin!

What is Coupon Marketing?

Coupons are things known to everyone, one way or another. Most people encountered them while making their purchases. Buy one, get another one for free. These are coupons – a free giveaway or discount. Coupon marketing is a marketing strategy that involves distributing discounts, bonuses, giveaways, gifts, etc. It is a great way to make customers engage with the platform, boost their loyalty, and increase the chance that they will come back to you. Coupons in marketing do not always involve a piece of paper.

Often, they come in a digital form, like in a client’s application. Many mobile apps have been using the coupon system in order to prevent their customers from abandoning the store. For example, Yves Rocher gives you discount coupons in exchange for points on the customer’s account. It’s in digital form, which is convenient since you don’t have to carry it around and risk forgetting it at home. Having a coupon encourages people to come back to your store and use it, which means that the customers who made a purchase once are more likely to purchase something again.

Coupon Sample Design is a Flourishing Online Business

Main Types of Digital Coupons

Coupons in marketing vary depending on the benefits that they include. Different types of coupons offer different types of attention from your customers. Having a variety of coupons is a good practice because it provides diverse engagement on your platform. That is why we are more than happy to tell you all about them: ways to use them and how they benefit your company. We also showcase how different types of coupons work with gamification marketing.

In particular, we will demonstrate to you how companies use the Winday Marketing Gamification Platform to distribute different types of coupons for their marketing purposes. In short, these businesses create zero-code marketing games using the platform. It takes less than 30 minutes to create one game since no coding is necessary. Then they distribute their games to potential and existing customers, offering to win discounts by playing games. Overall, it boosts interests, engagement, and conversion.

If you are interested in seeing more examples (or want to find a lucrative discount), check out Winday Club, where businesses publish their offers. Play and Win Coupons, Promo Codes & Exclusive Prizes from Top Brands.

Winday Club Coupons Examples

Project Management Tools

One of the most commonplace coupons in marketing is given to the customer after a first-time purchase. Whether it’s in digital or traditional format, they both work great for cart value improvement. How it works is simple. Once given a coupon, a person feels encouraged to buy more. Since they have a discount, they might as well purchase one more item, right? And when they do, they might feel less guilt than one usually does after spending money. With the discount, they feel like they’ve actually saved money, which might not be the case at all.

Percentage-based discounts are also good to use at times when the demand is higher. This involves Christmas, Halloween, back-to-school time, summer time, and other seasonal campaigns. Usually, it is at times like this that humans crave to buy new things. And then they get a discount right when they need it most. This motivates them to make even more purchases and spend more money at your store.

Gamification Tip:
Percentage-based discounts work perfectly with instant games, when people get their prize upon completion of the game.

Percentage-based Discount Coupons on Winday Club

Fixed-amount Discounts in Coupon Campaign Marketing

Fixed-amount discounts are usually discounts that offer you a very specific amount of money extracted from your purchase. In case of percentage-based discounts, the money that you save is proportional to the price of the product. However, fixed-amount discounts allow you to choose that amount of money yourself. Because of that, it works best when a discount is given for a specific item or a service your store provides.

By offering a discount like this, you choose for the customer how much money they will save when buying from your shop. Also, a discount in integers is easier to understand than a percentage. Not all of us are motivated enough to take their time to do proper calculations for percentages. Looking at a fixed-amount discount, one is aware of the benefits given to them, while the percentage-based discounts might be confusing to customers.

Check out this example of Winday Platform Brand Rotor One, offering a fixed-amount discount on the next flight on a helicopter:

Want to actually try this one? Play here, we won’t judge, helicopter flights are awesome!

Buy One Get One (BOGO) offers

Everybody likes to get things for free. Because why have one when you can have more for the same price? Companies satisfy that need by offering their customers BOGO (Buy One Get One). Along with the item they paid for, the user receives a little bonus, like a free sample or another product for free. People perceive it as a great way to save money. For retail businesses, it’s often a great way to tackle overstock or increase awareness about their new products. Getting more for the same price encourages people to make a purchase. A client who didn’t want to buy the product will be driven to change their mind with this tactic.

An example of a Shopify App that Enables Sellers to Create Bundles

Free shipping coupons

Paying for shipping is inconvenient to most people. Many clients are willing to pay a lot for the product; however, charges for shipping push them away. It’s a cause for a phenomenon called “cart abandonment”. A person does their online shopping, adding things to the cart, but once they are about to order, they see the charges for shipping, and they never actually make a purchase. If you want to decrease the number of those incidents in your shop, you should consider making shipping coupons.

More than that, you can actually increase AOV by using this. For example, offer free shipping to a customer once they’ve purchased a certain number of products, and voila, the user spends more money than they save. Very convenient for you and simple too.

Loyalty and Referral Coupon

Loyalty should always be rewarded; the same is true for customer referrals. Coupons are a great way to acknowledge that your customers have retained for an extended period of time or brought you new clients. This type of coupon is great for encouraging retention as well as gaining new customers. You can tie it to the account of your customer, just make sure they know about the discount you’ve given them.

Gamification Tip:
Create an exclusive game for your loyal customers and distribute it via QR code.

Time-limited or Quantity-limited Coupons

Time-limited items tend to be more desirable for people. It is that feeling of pressure to get something before it is gone forever. That is how the psychology of time-limited coupons works. When getting a discount that is only usable for a certain period of time, it encourages people to use it before it expires. It boosts the probability that the customers will make a purchase then a non-time-limited one. Because when there is no time limit, a person can just use it whenever they feel comfortable, and this includes never. If you don’t want your clients to forget about giving you money, you could make some of your discounts exclusive like that.

At Winday, we also used this tactic to earn new customers, offering them 1 month with Winday for free.

5 Benefits of Coupon Marketing Strategies

As we mentioned before, coupon marketing is a great method that has worked out for many companies, especially those working in retail and e-commerce. The benefits of coupon campaign marketing are present for both you and your customers. Let’s quickly review them before hopping on the steps to build a coupon strategy:

• Improved conversion rates. Coupons boost customer engagement as they increase interest in your product, service, or special offer.
• Better customer retention. Coupons can also drive retention since your customers will associate your business with great deals, which means they will buy more items from your company in the future.
• Customer data collection. Data is paramount in marketing. You can save the most enticing deals for customers who leave some of their data. In other words, by creating gated coupons, you can track your customers’ activity on your platform or in your offline business.
• User journeys personalization. Collecting the data of your customers through gated coupons as well as tracking and analyzing their activities allows you to create a more personalized journey for your clients. This, in turn, translates into better deals and even more conversions.
• Reactivation of dormant users. It is also a good technique to give your inactive users a little encouragement to start buying your products again.

Keep in mind that using marketing gamification will boost all the benefits of coupon marketing and will allow you to make the most out of your strategy.

7 Best Practices for Online Coupon Marketing Strategy

Here are some good practices that provide you with a working, efficient coupon marketing strategy.

1. To boost urgency, you need to keep your coupons time-limited. Time limitations create FOMO and push them to make impulsive decisions.
2. A/B test your coupon types. This will enable you to test which coupons drive a certain type of engagement or a certain segment of your audience. It will help you know which coupons work best for your business type and your customers, and will help you continuously improve your coupon marketing.
3. Coupons work even better with marketing gamification to make the receipt of your reward even more fun and exciting.
4. Remember not to overuse your coupon marketing strategies, this way you are actually losing more money than you are earning. Keep it balanced and nice. You and your products have value that you need to maintain.
5. Use different channels to distribute your coupons. There are many ways to give your customers a coupon, traditional and digital. Try different types from emails, and pop-up notifications, to bars and QR codes, to analog forms, like paper cards.
6. Make sure your coupons are responsive on all devices – computers, mobile phones, tablets. Customers aren’t loyal and will quickly lose interest if they face any challenges in redeeming their reward.
7. And last but not least, you should regularly analyze your customers’ engagement in coupon marketing in order to know which methods work the best.

Example of Marketing Gamification and Coupons Distribution

Steps to Create a Coupon Marketing Strategy

Now, as you’ve identified your need of having a coupon marketing plan, you are asking yourself a question: “How do I create one?”. We have that answer for you right here in a list below.

Step 1. Goals Coupon Marketing Strategy

First of all you need to understand what kind of thing you want to achieve with coupons. Because different things can be achieved by different methods, and you need to be 100% aware of your goals. Has your engagement been not so great? Perhaps you need to convert more people to be your clients? Or do you need more retention from your old clients who’ve abandoned you? You need to make that clear before anything else.

Setting Smart Goals for Coupon Marketing Strategy

Step 2. Audience Segmentation

At this stage, you need to select your audience, the receivers of the coupons, so to speak. This is important because you can render your marketing strategy adequate to the explicit target.

Step 3. Choosing Types of Coupons

Once you’ve done that, you have to choose the right type of coupon you’ll be using for your marketing strategy. As we’ve said earlier, different coupons are tools meant for different problems. That means that you have to pick one that works best in your situation. If you want more details on how each coupon works, we’ve described it all earlier in this article.

Step 4. Setting Limits and Tracking Usage

Don’t just introduce your coupons like it’s an everyday, plain thing. Make it fun and desirable by using gamification. For example, make a wheel of fortune where a client can win a coupon. Or a game of match 3. By using gamification mechanics and elements you remake something as ordinary as a coupon into an adventure! Your clients will be more than happy to receive the discounts this way.

Example of Time-limited Digital Coupon

Step 5. Adding Gamification Elements

Gamification can help you boost conversion. Luckily, with tools like Winday marketing gamification platform, you can set up your marketing game and even generate coupons in less than 30 minutes.

We’ll discuss the ways to boost your online coupon marketing strategy with gamification in our next section.

Effective Coupon Marketing Strategies with Winday Platform

Coupon campaign marketing can significantly benefit from gamification. Meet Winday, a SaaS platform where marketers can create marketing games for their customers. The best part? You don’t need to code as games have already been developed. All you need is to choose between instant games and tournaments, game mechanics, winning conditions, and customize skins and colors. And you’re good to go.

Instant Games for Coupon Distribution

Winday instant games enable players to play and get rewards immediately without delays (as in tournaments). You can set up the result that players need to achieve (e.g., reach a certain score), the duration of the game, and the difficulty. You also need to set the limit on a campaign to create a sense of urgency. There are two main limitations in the Winday platform: by time and by the number of discount codes. You can distribute your games by embedding them on your website, sharing a link or QR code on social media, via email, or other communications. You can also make it available in the Winday Club.

Tournament as a Key Element in Coupon Marketing Strategy

Winday enables its customers to create Tournaments. These are events that span several days or even weeks, and discounts are only granted for winners. You can use it to boost engagement and loyalty, as well as reward your most loyal customers and give away the most precious prizes.

A tournament is a great way to make your coupon marketing strategy even more successful for you and even more exciting for your clients. Leaderboards are a gamification element that targets your customers’ desire to compete and win. A system in which a client is not just a regular person anymore, they are a warrior who is fighting for a place on the leaderboard. It is thrilling and fun for the user, and it boosts engagement and session time for you.

Coupon distribution strategy:

You can intertwine coupons into this system by making them the rewards for the people with the highest score, or who are the highest in the rank. That way users can be motivated to engage as much as they can in order to get their rewards. Also, an even more engagement boosting strategy will be to introduce daily or weekly challenges. Any limited-time events push people to participate in them before they are gone forever, which makes them more likely to actually do it.

However, a simple leaderboard may not be enough, as some clients will be disappointed when they lose, and they will abandon you. Add something for them to avoid that. Make a system of points and scores that can be exchanged for coupons. Those points can be earned by, for example, playing a mini-game, making a purchase, or engaging with your company in any other way. By doing this, the rest of your clients can still feel like they haven’t wasted your time engaging with you, even if they haven’t necessarily won a place in the leaderboard.

How to generate coupon codes with Winday?

Winday Platform can generate coupon codes, including barcodes and QR codes in several most popular code generating systems. It’s a step in the process of gamification campaign creation on the platform. If you have your own codes, there’s also an opportunity to upload them into your game, and the platform will distribute them to your players. If you generate coupon codes with Winday, remember to download the file with codes to your device.

Here’s how to add discount codes for your marketing games using Winday:

1. After you’ve set up your game and its branding, Winday Platform will offer you to set up Game Start and Game Over Screen. In the Game Over Screen setup, choose how you want to distribute your codes: via email or show at once.
2. Choose the amount of codes that are available for one player.
3. Inform your players how to get the reward. There’s a pre-written note, which you can rewrite by clicking Edit.
4. You will be redirected to the Code Settings setup. First, choose whether you want to generate codes or upload them.
5. Upload Route:
   • Click upload, the functionality for Upload code will appear.
   • Choose the amount of discount codes per game (up to 1,000)
   • Upload the codes by drag’n’dropping .txt or .xls file.
   • You can download an example of a code list to match the required format.
6. Generate Route:
   • Select Barcodes and Barcode Type if necessary. Barcodes will be generated at the time of issuing the code.
   • Set up the amount of codes per game. The minimal amount is one, the maximal amount is 1000 (for Free Plan) and much more for Basic or Enterprise Plans.
   • Select the code length in characters from 6 to 36.
   • Select the discount code template (the options include all caps; all caps + numbers; caps + lowercase + numbers; caps + lowercase + numbers + special characters; all numbers).
   • You can set up Code prefix and Code Postfix to brand your barcode.
   • Click generate codes.
   • Download the generated codes on your PC and add them into your system.
7. Confirm that codes are correct and are valid on your website.

Winday platform can also be integrated with your CRMs and e-commerce platforms. Since the coupon system enables you to track your customers’ behavior, this integration will enable you to collect more valuable data and insights and improve your marketing campaigns.

Overall, Winday enables you to drive customer engagement as people still see marketing gamification as a fun novelty that they would eagerly participate in. It also helps you drive brand awareness and loyalty as games impress your potential customers and are remembered.

Ready to Boost Your Coupon Marketing with Gamification?