Discounts and coupons are used to increase repeat sales and get customers back into the store. But just sending coupons to all your customers can be less effective and can even yield negative results. In order to maximize the effectiveness, you need to send it to the right customer at the right time.
For example, you can send a coupon to customers who have not purchased during the past 90 days, offering an incentive to come back. This marketing tactic, called email remarketing, is used by eCommerce retailers to leverage their existing relationships with customers in order to increase repeat sales.
Small and medium retailers that do not have the time or expertise to constantly analyze their data, can use Remarkety to automatically find these opportunities. Remarkety’s platforms sends automated emails based on customers’ behavior and purchase history. With Remarkety retailers can automatically win back inactive customers, recover abandoned carts, turn members into customers, increase repeated sales, incentivize clients with reward programs, and more. The emails can be sent without coupons, but adding coupons to some of these emails can dramatically increase conversion rates.
In this blog post we will examine the aggregated data from thousands of retailers to understand how the addition of coupons to email marketing campaigns can increase conversion rates, which types of campaigns are more effective with coupons, and how to add coupons to the emails that are sent through Remarkety.
Are marketing emails with added coupons more effective?
The following chart compares the results of campaigns that used coupons, with those that did not:
- Open rate – Did more customers open a remarketing email that came with an enclosed coupon?
- Click rate – Did more customers click inside a remarketing email with an enclosed coupon?
- Conversion rate – Did more customers make a purchase as a result of a remarketing email with an enclosed coupon?
Open rate increases with coupons
As shown in the diagram above, the results are clearly in favor of coupons. Open rates of email remarketing campaigns are generally much higher than the known stats for regular email marketing campaigns due to their extreme personalization and relevance. But when using coupons these rates are much higher reaching an average of 36%, representing an increase of 76%. Considering that these numbers represent an average, if you do it right and you are extremely relevant to your audience, open rates can be even much higher.
Click rate increases with coupons
Average click rates for email remarketing are also higher than traditional email marketing. And in this case the use of coupons raised this average by 82% to 6.54%.
Conversion rate increases with coupons
As we can see in the diagram above the use of coupons in email remarketing has more than tripled the conversion rate, reaching 9.86%. This means that one in every ten emails that are sent will use a coupon to make a purchase. These are undoubtedly amazing results.
Some of you may notice that the click rate is lower than the conversion rate. At first we were surprised by this result, but after careful examination we found that since the coupons that are sent in the emails are not clickable, users usually don’t click the email, but rather enter the coupon code manually (without clicking). We have since solved this by allowing the addition of a link to the coupon that can direct the user to the website or to a specific page.
Coupon effectiveness varies according to email remarketing activity
As we have shown in the previous section, coupons add to the effectiveness of email remarketing campaigns. As Remarkety has a variety of email remarketing campaigns, we were also interested to compare how much a coupon improves the effectiveness of each of these types. For example, how much does a coupon improve an order follow-up campaign, where a customer who just made an order is offered a discount on an additional purchase? And, how much does a coupon improve an abandoned cart campaign?
The results of this comparison are shown in the following chart:
The chart above shows that the campaigns that are most positively affected by adding a coupon are the rewards program campaigns based on the total amount spent, reaching average conversion rates (purchases) of more than 85%! In this campaign, the amount of the coupon offered is according to the amount of money you spend in the store. For example, a customer who spends more than 100 dollars, is given five dollars off their next purchase; more than 200 dollars, 15 dollars off their next purchase, and so on. These campaigns are very successful, often reaching average conversion rates (purchases) of more than 85%. Reward programs that increase the discount offered according to the number of items bought, although not as effective as the former, still achieve conversion rates of more than 45%!
We can see that order follow-up campaigns also achieve amazing results, reaching average conversion rates of almost 15%! In this campaign, an email was sent to customers who just made an order, offering the customer to add a product from itsautomated product recommendations (e.g. Customers who purchased this lawn mower also purchased this blower.).
How to add personal coupons to email marketing campaigns?
Coupons can be added to any automated email marketing campaign, at the time that the campaign is set up. The coupon is a special tag, which includes various settings, such as expiration date, one-time use only, or recipient use only. As mentioned above, the coupon can be directly linked to any page, such as the store’s homepage or specific product page. These coupons are generated automatically by interfacing with the e-commerce platform of the store through an API.
Example of creating personal coupon in Remarkety using an easy drag&drop editor
Since the coupon is a real coupon in the e-commerce platform, the user can redeem the coupon at any time in the store itself, according to the expiration date that was defined. Once you set up the campaign with the coupon, Remarkety will constantly analyze the activity in the online store, and automatically send emails whenever an event occurs in the store according to the campaign logic. For example, if it detects a customer who has been inactive for 90 days, it sends an email with a coupon to that specific shopper.
