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How Advertisers Can Use Coupons to Promote Their Local Businesses

February 28, 2024

How You Can Use Coupons to Promote Your Local Business

Since the COVID-19 pandemic, interest in shopping locally has grown, so local businesses have been trying to establish and grow their brands, by targeting their prospective audiences in the most efficient and effective ways possible.

Why You Should Use Coupons to Advertise Your Business Locally

Marketing with coupons is a promotional strategy that attracts attention since there’s a deal involved. Everyone loves a sale or an opportunity to get something at a discounted price. While increased business is the overall objective for your local businesses, using coupon marketing offers many other benefits. These include:

  • Attracting new audiences for your products or services
  • Promoting brand awareness and establishing your brand
  • Incentivizing customer loyalty and rewarding repeat customers to show appreciation
  • Driving website traffic by sharing coupons on social media and email blasts
  • Gathering customer data, such as email addresses or other information in exchange for discount coupons
  • Tracking the success of your marketing campaigns, by assigning a particular method to redeem coupons.

When attracting new customers, a coupon marketing strategy can be highly effective. Key strategies you can employ to grow your business through coupon marketing to attract new customers include:

  • Targeted marketing— To attract specific customer segments, you can create coupons to specifically appeal to a particular demographic or market segment. As a sporting goods store, for example, might send out discount coupons for golf balls, tees, or gloves to members of country clubs.
  • Increased visibility— Because many people actively search for coupons and deals, you can offer new customers a coupon or deal to try out your products or services. By showing up in searches, you can expand your audience to shoppers who might otherwise be unaware of what you have to offer.
  • Incentivized trial— Encourage customers to try your product or service for the first time, by offering them a discount or promotional deal. Reducing the perceived risk for potential customers to try your products may incentivize them to purchase your products. This is a great strategy when businesses want to launch new products or for new businesses trying to establish a customer base. A new bath shop might send out a coupon for a special sample of their moisturizers to area women who have shown an interest in receiving coupons.
  • Customer acquisition— Businesses that offer discounts or deals to first-time customers encourage potential customers to try new products or services.
  • Word-of-Mouth marketing— When customers receive a coupon or discount and have a positive experience, they’re likely to tell their family and friends, who in turn are attracted to your business because of referrals.

Some popular strategies to retain your existing customers using coupons include:

  • Personalized Coupons— Customers like this tailored approach and feel incentivized to continue their relationship with your business. As a clothing store might offer a great deal on raincoats, going into the spring season to existing customers.
  • Limited Time Offers— Creating a sense of urgency motivates your customers to respond. Dance studios might offer a discount on after-school dance classes with only a few spots left, to motivate dance parents.
  • Loyalty Programs— Rewarding your customers with coupons or discounts can encourage them to shop with you again and again. Stores might offer existing customers a discount or deal on products they have shown an interest in but didn’t purchase previously.
  • Referral Programs— Offering incentives to refer friends and family to you for discounts or coupons helps expand your business and grow brand loyalty.
  • Social Media Promotions— Offering special promotions on social media platforms. can keep your customers engaged with your social media pages.
  • Email Campaigns—Sending out newsletters and exclusive discounts and promotions can keep you top-of-mind with your customers.

Other strategies popular to retain customers include sending out seasonal and holiday coupons and discounts.

Digital vs Print

While digital marketing is more convenient and relatively inexpensive compared to TV and other traditional ads, it’s important to note that:

  • Print mail still ranks as the third largest ad medium in the US and second to TV advertising.
  • Print mail marketing is a thriving $46 billion dollar industry and growing annually.
  • Digital coupons have a more expansive reach, but the numbers show that print mail coupons are redeemed more than their digital counterparts.

Money Mailer Coupon Envelopes

Given the complexities you face in deciding where and how to spend your marketing dollars, which medium should you choose for the best results in growing your local business? As it turns out, it’s better to choose both! Research has revealed that printed mail campaigns when paired with digital advertising, result in even higher response rates than just print mail or digital ads alone. Money Mailer offers a straightforward and powerful solution to local marketing strategies. As a shared mail concept, Money Mailer is known for its red, white, and blue envelopes, chock full of money-saving offers, that are distributed to more than eight million homes in over 15 states. A shared mail envelope provides your business a money-saving way to reach hyper-targeted groups that will be more likely than others to want to try out or purchase your products or services. As each business is responsible for a percentage of the cost of offers included in shared mail envelopes, the more advertisers that participate, the more each business can save.

Print Disrupts the Digital Noise

As consumers have grown more and more inundated with digital advertising in our increasingly digital lives, direct mail offers a respite from the digital noise with a piece of physical mail that disrupts the noise. Due to the decrease in physical mail people receive, Money Mailer coupons stand out and are appreciated, as consumers make purchasing decisions at various touchpoints in their customer journeys.

Money Mailer’s fully integrated marketing package features hyper-local shared mail pieces paired with digital placements on MoneyMailer.com, the Money Mailer Mobile Coupon App, social media, email, and more. With interactive print that uses WebAR QR codes, Money Mailer opens the gateway between print and digital marketing, resulting in print mail that has evolved into a vital feature of integrated multichannel marketing.

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