How to lose sales using coupon codes

Coupon Codes sound great in theory; you can offer a short or long term discount, rewarding your existing customers or attracting new ones.

You can see one in action on the new General Pants Online Store:



But for the most part, I reckon coupon codes, vouchers, promo-codes, call them what you will, do your online sales more harm than good, and here’s why.

I don’t know about you, but every time I see a coupon code field in a shopping cart process, I race off to Google and type in “retailer.com coupon code”. And I’m not alone; there are thousands of searches every month on Google for just those terms.

Here’s proof.



You can see from keyword research that approximately 74,000 searches are conducted monthly at Google for “newegg promo code” and for Amazon, it’s around 49,000. The numbers in the middle column are estimated local searches.

And with the rise in popularity of Smart Company award winning sites like www.retailmenot.com the trend can only continue upwards.

See, when someone sees a coupon code field, they often think to themselves, “How come someone else can get this cheaper than me?” or “I don’t want to be a sucker and overpay!” And they’re perfectly reasonable feelings to have in anyone’s book.

The other risk coupon codes pose is you (the customer) losing your flow and leaving the middle of checkout process to go off in search of a coupon code online so you can score a better deal. And if you can’t find one, there’s a chance you’ll get annoyed and not complete the purchase at all!

Of course the other downside to coupon codes is the margin they take away from your profits. Not only that, some (sneaky) affiliates will often attach their special tracking to your coupon codes (in a link) so you’re paying affiliate commisions on top of the coupon discount for any sales generated.

I also think that for some brands, coupon codes can potentially damage the brand by cheapening their image and condition their customers to expect a discount time after time. They may not be willing to pay full price with you again!

I read recently (but can’t for the life of me find the article to cite, so you’ll have to trust me!) that one online retailer couldn’t figure out why so many people were dropping out of the checkout process at one particular stage. So they tried A/B split testing and in one of the variations, they removed the coupon code field. It immediately unblocked the cart and sales rose dramatically.

So is there a solution?

Well, yes, sort of.

I think the best solution is not to display a coupon code field at all and offer no codes to anyone. Instead provide ‘those in the know’ a unique link to the promotion. You’d need a developer to set this up, but you’d make a subfolder like this:

http://www.reseo.com/20-percent-off

Hitting that subfolder would create a parameter which would include the coupon code and automatically apply the discount at checkout, meaning customers wouldn’t see a coupon code field at all.

Sure the link might be shared around, but it would stop people seeing the coupon code field and heading off online to get one!

It would stop me!

Update 15 Jan 2010: Our analytics report shows 7 visits to this page from people searching for "general pants promo code" in the last 30 days. This post currently ranks 5th at Google for that term, so people are definitely searching for promo codes from retailers!

Make online shopping fun for visitors!

Adding some levity during the ecommerce process is a great way to build trust and improve your online sales.

One example which springs to mind is Virgin, who have created an upbeat, fun and cheeky style to their online experience for users. I like their conversational style; it’s certainly not stuffy!

Here’s an example during their checkout process:



Here’s another example from Teefury. As soon as I saw it I smiled as it was completely unexpected (and then shared it with my colleagues).



What I like about these examples is the disarming nature of the approach. If you can turn a frown upside down, I reckon you’re more than half way to securing a sale.

But you know, humour is a funny thing. Sometimes just when you think a gag is going to be hilarious, it can turn around and bite you – just look at Hey Hey it’s Wednesday.

So if you’re going to try a little humour, please test it out on some friends before you offer it the world!

Another really fun shopping experience I had the pleasure of trying out the other day was Plurchase – which, as they say, “lets you shop at your favorite stores with your friends”.



My colleague Liesl and I tried it and absolutely loved it.

It’s a doddle to invite friends to along on your shopping trip and you can all chat away as you browse through the site (shown at the bottom of the purple side bar).

Seriously, keep an eye on this thing because I have a feeling it could be big and it could change the way online retailers model their stores. At the moment our online retail stores are really geared towards just individuals browsing their websites.

This is a potentially game changing product, because it now allows two or more people to shop together online, commenting on products, and asking for advice as they go!

Notwithstanding any privacy issues, I wonder if they’ll ever allow website owners the chat information. If they were able to do that, I think this could also become a brilliant usability tool.

Let’s make shopping fun!

And a big thanks to Reactive's new gun Account Director Su Debnath for bringing Plurchase to my attention for today's post!

eCommerce – Re-convert the converted

I guess everyone knows it’s easier to make more money from existing customers than to entice new ones. So if you’re into online sales and eCommerce lets explore ways to get some repeat custom from those fabulous customers of yours!

Your fulfillment process probably goes something like this:

1. Order comes in
2. Order get processed (product in bag/box with receipt)
3. Customer is notified of dispatch via email
4. Order posted/couriered

Where I think the process can be really strengthened is at stage 2. I order lots of things online and usually I just get what I ordered and a receipt, in a bag. Of course that’s perfectly fine, but it’s on those rare occasions when a merchant throws in a little ‘value add’ freebie that I feel quite grateful and much more tempted to contact them with a little testimonial...

Some examples of unexpected freebies I’ve received include:

• A postcard (showing the city of the business I bought the product from – in this case Chicago), nice touch!
• Shoe polish (came with the shoes)
• A pen (branded of course!)
• Ear plugs!

Ok, so they’re little and knick-knacky – but they left an impression.

By the way, what have you received that we can add to the list for inspiration?

One site which took it a little further was http://www.KidzBrandz.com.au – where I recently bought a little outfit my daughter. I really liked the way when I received the package that there was care in the way it was packed and that they included a brochure, and promo flyer and a fridge magnet!

Seriously, that’s such an easy, obvious and cheap thing to implement into your fulfillment process. There’s a branded fridge magnet at home (yep, on the fridge) the brochure showed lots of other products and a promo-code encouraged me to repeat purchase.

So let’s recap:

1. Throw in a fridge magnet, a pen or a mouse mat printed with your web address, (as hopefully these will be in close proximity to your customers computer!). Use your imagination!

2. Pack products carefully and thoughtfully (gift wrap if possible – presentation is so important – but try and do it as environmentally friendly as possible!)
3. Offer a reward, a promo-code, something to say “hey, thanks” and please buy from us again! (tell your friends!)

One final note, another customer of ours has implemented a really neat way catch and convert potential customers who didn’t make it to the end of the conversion process. What the developer did was capture and store email address data (from the beginning of the order process), and spit out a report which shows all the folks who didn’t go all the way through the cart to purchase.

This allowed them to shoot an email as a follow-up with a “free offer” to encourage them to complete the process, with surprisingly stunning conversion rates!

Nifty.

6 Steps to optimising your e-commerce products pages

The most daunting prospect for any shopping cart owner is SEO’ing every single product in their shopping cart. If you’ve got thousands of products in your site, you can be forgiven for not even attempting to optimise your product pages. Sometimes when a job seems too big and too daunting it can paralyze all initiative!

So this week’s tips to improve your online sales will be short, easily digestible, and (hopefully) actionable.

1. Break the job down into small, easy bits. Start by targeting and optimising the top 10 best selling products in your cart. Then do the next best 20 and so on.
   
   
2. Make sure you include the name of the product or service in your Page Title Tag. You need to format it so you keep the name of the product or service first, the name of your company second.
   
   
3. The next important page element for SEO is your Heading Tag. Include your product or service name in your H1 tag.
   
   
4. Obviously every product or service needs a description. I’m often shocked by how little effort online retailers take to describe their products. Given that Google needs at least 250-300 words per page to create a complete “relevance” picture, it’s in your interests to make sure your description is fully optimised and that the benefits of the product or service are blindingly obvious. My ten cents; hire a copywriter.
   
   
5. Product images should also be optimised, so name your image with the product’s actual name ie: blue-widget.jpg. Make sure that when you include the picture on the page that you use an image “alt” tag which also uses the product’s name.
   
   
6. If you’re reselling products that are not your own, don’t copy the exact same content from the original manufacturer. Substantially rewrite your copy to avoid having your page penalized by Google’s duplicate content filter. If you have substantially similar content as the original content creator, Google will stop your result from appearing the in the search results.
   

Honestly, if you get into the habit of ensuring your detailed product descriptions are fully optimised with engaging copy which encourages conversions (purchases), you’ll be a long way ahead of most your competitors!