Do coupons work?

If you’ve had any thoughts on promoting your business, you’ve probably toyed with the idea of offering a COUPON for a discount on your product or services.

Eric Sink has been kind enough to share the results of a recent coupon promotion he ran.  He’s done a great job of analyzing the data from his coupon promotion.  In the end, he determined that 20 percent of the customers who redeemed the coupon would not have purchased otherwise.  Even with that big "win" in the column, he also notes that almost 50% of the coupon redeemers would have purchased the software at full price. 

In the end, Eric and his team are viewing the coupon promotion as a success, after all when you gain new customers, it’s easy to qualify that as a win.

In my experience with small business owners, Eric and his team are the exception rather than the rule.  I’ve worked with many small business owners who live and die by the coupon campaigns they run.  Few do the follow up done by Eric and his team.  Probably the biggest lesson to learn from the above coupon promotion is that the real value is in the information obtained by the follow up campaign.  If Eric and his team hadn’t followed up on those who redeemed the coupon, they wouldn’t have the information they now have… information about current customers and how they got to be customers in the first place.  Now that is priceless.

If you need a step by step guide to creating truly effective marketing messages for your small business- pick up a copy of my book Beyond the Niche: Essential Tools You Need to Create Marketing Messages that Deliver Results.