Coupon Strategies - Types of Discounts and Coupons for your Affiliate Program

In my previous post on Why to Use Coupons With Your Affiliate Program we looked at the reasons coupons could be a win-win-win strategy for merchants, affiliates and shoppers. Now let’s take a look at discount and coupon tactics to employ when creating and distributing coupons.

When coming up with coupons, it’s important to keep in mind the tactical goal you wish to achieve. Let’s take a look at a few possible goals:

• Coupons can help to introduce and establish new customers who are then likely to become repeat customers.
• Discounts like "buy one get one for $5 off" encourage additional purchases while offers like "10% off total purchase" will often entice customers to buy in greater volume.
• Coupons for specific products can help introduce a new product to customers or help drive traffic to a specific part of the store/landing page.
• Coupons can help introduce your store to people “shopping around” on coupon sites for a deal on a competitors offering.
• Coupons can help target a very particular customer group. example: (A recent study by Burst Media entitled "What Mom Likes Online" found that moms in particular are more than willing to click to get coupons - 45% of moms age 18–34 and 55% moms age 35–54 make it part of their daily routine.)

My favorite method for coming up with a coupon to distribute is to take a look at the “Average Order Value” for purchases. Suppose the average order value for affiliate orders is $80. To help give that A.O.V. a kick, create a coupon that will give a discount on a minimum order of $100. This type of coupon is very easy to measure value by simply comparing how much average order values increases with total dollar values saved from the coupon use.

When coming up with a recommended coupon strategy, it’s useful to survey several of the major coupon affiliates and analyze what kind of coupons your competitors are using. If they are targeting specific products or keywords, it might be worth creating your own deals for those products so that your coupons will come up right along with your competitors coupons during customer searches.

If there’s a part of your site that is getting less traffic than other pages, or if there’s a certain keyword phrase you’re not ranking well for, or customers are bouncing off your page from, then it might be worthwhile to create some coupons or discounts for those products on that page. Spread those coupons around and get additional keyword exposure through the coupon sites with affiliate links point to and landing on your site. Again it’s easy to measure the effectiveness by simply seeing if you get increases in traffic to the relevant pages.

These are just a few ideas to brainstorm with your affiliate program manager when coming up with coupon ideas. Of course, there are a few more ideas in our hat, but I can’t reveal everything here. In a couple days I’ll discuss one of the biggest “grumbling” issue (shoppers already committed to purchase that leave the site looking for a coupon) that merchants have with coupons and talk about a few strategies to help mitigate the issue.