From the beginning the coupon was a successful marketing tactic, starting with Coca-Cola’s original coupon for a free Cola in the late 1800s. It’s estimated that between 1894 and 1913, one in nine Americans had received a free Coca-Cola as a result of their coupon campaigns (a total of 8,500,000 free drinks). While coupon tactics evolved throughout the century, the most recent innovation, digital coupons, has stemmed from the digital revolution.
I recently had the pleasure of interviewing industry expert Alex Brookbank about social coupons in the evolving digital age and how they help email marketers. Alex is the Channel Marketing Manager at CoupSmart, a social coupon and digital promotions platform for CPGs, QSRs and retail brands.
What is the significance of digital coupons?
Alex: Digital coupons entered the market in the 1990s and have grown quickly in recent years. They currently represent 10.7 percent of all coupon redemptions, including FSIs, print-at-home and load-to-card segments.
How do digital coupons differ from traditional couponing?
Alex: Digital coupons utilize all the benefits of traditional couponing such as growing sales and market share, but also add in another valuable angle – data acquisition. Capturing the right data during the consumer claiming process can fuel other marketing efforts, such as email remarketing campaigns.
Email remarketing is a powerful method for a number of reasons. It is a 1:1 communication platform and using it to remarket to individuals implies these individuals have previously been targeted, and therefore, the messages are highly relevant. But before sending retargeted messages, a customer’s email address must be acquired during the coupon claiming process (which is normal).
Tell me about how to capture the right data with social coupons.
Alex: The majority of digital, print-at-home coupons are discovered through destination sites, (sites that aggregate coupons and focus on building their own traffic). Conversely, social coupons are digital coupons integrated with social platforms, which allows the brand to reach millions of fans and consumers from their own social sites/pages.
When a customer claims a social coupon, their email address and profile data, (demographic data, and likes and interests), is captured/acquired by the brand. This interaction provides several data points in addition to the actual retrieval of the email.
- First, the coupon has been claimed, so the consumer is highly interested in the brand.
- Second, the brand will know if and when the coupon is claimed.
- Third, the consumer has a unique social profile detailing in-depth demographic and psychographic data, which can be segmented among a brand’s entire database for in-depth consumer insights.
The combination of this data can lead to successful, targeted, and relevant email remarketing campaigns through popular email marketing platforms such as WhatCounts.
This sounds like a must-have for online retailers. Have any examples of how a brand used a digital coupon to create a successful campaign?
Alex: Lots of eCommerce brands are finding driving ROI with digital couponing. Here’s just one example: During a promotional campaign on Facebook, Lindt Chocolate received data about over 600,000 fans. Because of the data collected during this social campaign, Lindt determined many of its fans liked, or were interested in, baking. Therefore, the brand created email content that included recipes to educate its customers on how they could bake using Lindt Chocolate.
This email campaign included 600,000 unique customers, of which, 30 percent opened and 26 percent clicked-through.
Lindt Chocolate enjoyed the largest holiday sales increase in five years, with a sustained sales increase throughout the next year. Because of the success of the email remarketing campaign, Lindt Chocolate deployed the marketing tactic in their overall strategy by placing recipes on its website.
What are email remarketing best practices Lindt Chocolate and other brands have used to ensure their campaigns are a success?
Alex: From this campaign and others, here are three email remarketing best practices to follow.
- Take advantage of segmented data, (analyze both the demographic and psychographic), to send custom content.
- Track individual prints/claims/redemptions – and send emails accordingly.
- Use the data for broad marketing initiatives that extend beyond email marketing campaigns.
Why does following those best practices and email remarketing in general matter so much?
Alex: Despite mildly popular claims to the contrary, email continues to be a tremendously important marketing channel. According to these studies, two thirds of respondents believe email is very or extremely important to their current strategy, and in this study, email was rated the most effective digital marketing tactic in the United States.
We, too, are seeing the signs that email marketing isn’t going away soon. If someone wanted to get started with using social couponing to advance his or her email marketing, what are the steps you’d recommend?
Alex: I’d recommend four steps initially.
- Step 1: Take advantage of and utilize the most popular social platform today, which is Facebook.
- Step 2: Develop a strategic and effective promotional campaign for Facebook’s platform.
- Step 3: Run a successful campaign by capturing a plethora of demographic and psychographic data from customers that claimed your offer.
- Step 4: Use this data to create ROI-adding email remarketing campaigns.
Could 2015 be the year when digital coupons evolve from consumer-facing destination sites to technological platforms?
Alex: Could be. The race is on.
Joy Ugi