E-commerce Tips & Tricks

7 min read

13 Nov 2024

How To Use Coupon Advertising To Grow Your Ecommerce Store

While growing your eCommerce store, there are various price-related tactics you can use to attract customers. Methods like discounting have been commonly used for a while now, though they have their own limitations.

An eCommerce store can use coupons to expand on its discount objectives where conventional discounts fall short. Coupons, whether physical or digital, will definitely rely on a properly built store to be successful.

With a good theme, you can use prompts and other page elements and site functions to guide visitors to the areas where they can utilize their coupons.

Let’s go through some coupon advertising strategies that can help you grow your eCommerce store in 2025 and beyond:

Establish An Offer
Choose A Coupon Type
Expand Your Email List
Test Different Channels
Limit The Validity Period
Aim At Holidays
Seek Customer Feedback
Set A Minimum Order Amount
Tie Them To Influencers
Target Abandoned Carts
Use Appealing Visuals
Capture First-Time Visitors
Use Buy-One-Get-One-Free Coupons
Push Using Ads

Establish An Offer

The first step of any coupon marketing strategy should be to visualize what offer you want to give. One of the best ways to do this is by going through data generated by site visitors to find out what they are looking at most, how much they are spending per order on average etc.

The goal is to find out which products seem to move slowly even when they get some attention. You also want to be able to estimate the increase you might see in the amount any visitor spends if they know they can save a percentage.

At the end of this stage, you need to have decided on whether your coupons will apply to particular products or expenditures in general. Alternatively, you can create different offers with the aim of increasing the average order value while also clearing some slow-moving items.

Choose A Coupon Type

Digital coupons come in many forms so once you’ve settled on an offer, find out other attributes about your target customers that influence delivery methods. For example, you may find that up to 90% of the people you hope will use the coupons, shop on mobile devices.

This means that you may have to opt for mobile coupons that are integrated into mobile shopping apps. If the sole goal is to attract more mobile shoppers, they can be entirely restricted to the mobile site and app.

You also need to understand who your target is when choosing the type of coupon for your coupon marketing strategy. You should understand what they are interested in, and what motivates them to spend their previous backs to buy your product. This will help you create a coupon type that catches their attention especially if its value is enough to incentivize your customers to take action, but not too high that it eats into your profit.

There are also other forms like downloadable coupons, promo codes, etc. you can use for your coupon advertising.

Expand Your Email List

One of the most effective ways to market your coupons is through an email marketing campaign. So once you’ve selected an offer and a digital coupon type, create a new call to action (CTAs) that request visitors’ email addresses.

They can be tweaked to have their copy include a hint at the coupons. Use phrases like “Don’t miss out on our new round of coupon codes! Sign up now and get all the latest updates on our best offers.”

Not only does this help you increase the number of people you’ll be sending coupons to, but it will also help you gauge visitors’ level of interest in coupons before they go out. To get more email addresses you need a theme that can display pop-ups strategically.

Test Different Channels

Another benefit of using coupon advertising is that it can help you find out which channels bring in more customers. Put different coupons with the same value on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and email then track each of them to see which channel has more people responding to them.

With the data obtained, you can conduct your future coupon programs with more precision and reach the right kind of people in large numbers.

Limit The Validity Period

A good way to make sure that your coupons are widely used is by creating a sense of urgency. Shoppers must feel like they need to use them immediately. The best way to do this is by putting an end date for when they can be redeemed.

To ensure that it sticks, you can go further by sending periodic reminders to anyone who clearly opened the coupon email. Add some of your more attractive products into the picture to persuade the shoppers a little more.

Another effective way to do this is by posting 24-hour coupon discounts on your Facebook and Instagram Stories. This can help create FOMO since it expires within a day. You can find more ways to create a sense of urgency here.

Aim At Holidays

Holidays get a lot of people wanting to shop more. If you decide to use coupon marketing in 2023, try and create some coupons themed around particular holidays. Make sure that you talk about them for a decent amount of time before the holiday itself.

Pay attention to what your competitors are putting out towards those days and respond with more competitive offers where possible. Make a list of the most popular items bought during specific holidays. You can create coupons that are tied to those particular products.

Look for some other less popular holidays and craft coupons for them too. This will help you enjoy less competition since other stores may be caught off guard.

Seek Customer Feedback

Whenever someone uses a digital coupon, have your site set up to ask them a few questions. These could be about how easy they found the process of redeeming it. Or what percentage deduction on the price they find generous.

With more feedback on your coupons, you can make some changes to how you deliver them, how much of a deduction you give, etc. These surveys can also help you find out whether you’re putting the coupons on the right products.

Set A Minimum Order Amount

Sometimes digital coupons can be used to increase the number of money shoppers is spending on an order. Check your customer data to see the average order value of your customers. Also, find out the average number of items they buy as compared to how many they look at.

You want to make sure you’re dealing with a group of people that aren’t only interested in one or two things. Look at some of the lowest item prices. Add one to the average order value, then apply the coupon.

The goal is to see whether you’re still left with a substantial increase in the revenue from that order after the coupon is used. This will help you get a fair idea of how much higher above the average order value, your minimum order value must be set.

Once you’ve established that, make that minimum clearly known to whoever views the coupon offers. Go a step further by creating prompts that notify a shopper about how much closer they are to be able to use a coupon.

Use a phrase like “Don’t check out just yet, you are only $12 away from getting 20% off with a coupon code.” You can learn more about coupon conditions and how to structure other details of a coupon offer here.

Tie Them To Influencers

If you have influencers as part of your overall marketing strategy for your store, generate coupon codes that are unique to each of them. This will help you gain more insight into the crowd an influencer is speaking to, beyond engagement on their pages.

Some influencers may be better at creating awareness while others may be speaking to a more interested group that wants to buy. After gathering the data on the usage of different coupon codes, you can then assign the best performers more of your coupon work.

Target Abandoned Carts

When a shopper is about to leave a cart without checking out, display a pop-up to get them to sign up for updates on amazing offers. If an abandoned cart belongs to a shopper whose email address you have, you can reach out to them with a digital coupon.

The advantages of this method are; You get to send coupons to people who already had the intent to buy rather than attracting a mass of discount hunters. You also get to have a list of people from which you can pick those who already meet a minimum order amount.

Use Appealing Visuals

One mistake that many store owners make is to present their coupons as plain text or number codes. While this is the most important piece of information, it is not the most enticing. Invest in some photography that you can use as the face of your coupons.

In some cases, you can create a collage or assemble a variety of products that you sell in one photo. Go on to add some copy letting the customers know that they can get any of those items with a coupon.

Capture First-Time Visitors

Set up your store to detect shoppers who are visiting for the first time. Display a pop-up welcoming them. Let them know that they have been awarded a coupon for the first purchase they make.

If the visitor is not in the mood to buy instantly, give them the option to save the coupon by signing up. This method is particularly effective for reeling in new shoppers. Without a proper theme, coupons may not work on first-time buyers.

It is possible for them to opt in but still fail to quickly find the products that captivate them. With a theme like Debutify, you can position categories, recommendations, and related products in the right way.

Along with a strong product search feature, first-time visitors can easily find what they want to buy. Download Debutify, the highest-converting free Shopify theme, and get more sales out of first-time visitors.

Use Buy-One-Get-One-Free Coupons

Look for items that are cheap enough and could have been used in giveaways. Pair them up and create a buy-one-get-one-free coupon for them. Another way to go about this is by bundling up different products.

You can select a winning product and tie it to a slow-moving product. Shoppers can then benefit from getting a product that they like, along with a bonus. Such a coupon will make more sense if the steady-moving product is one with a high markup.

It also helps if the slow-moving product is actually a very cheap one. This means that you still make a decent profit even after putting them together.

Push Using Ads

Just because coupons help customers save, doesn’t mean that they’ll enjoy massive awareness on their own. From Facebook to Google Display ads, make sure you get your coupons as much visibility as possible.

Try involving even other channels like SMS since they allow for cheap bulk messaging. Make sure you set up your ads with customers. You want to ensure that they are more likely to be seen by people who are interested in those offers.

Learn more about how to set up Google Display ads here.

Start using coupons to grow your eCommerce store

In conclusion, coupons can be an effective part of ecommerce promotion strategies if you have a solid plan. It all starts with carrying out research about the state of your store and understanding how customers behave.

The next step is to come up with both short and long-term targets. In the short term, it might be best to stick to trying to accumulate visitors even if they don’t buy immediately. This is because coupons may take more time and money to win over those who have never visited the store.

When you finally get a decent number of people who have expressed some level of interest in your store’s products, you can then revisit your coupon advertising strategy. This is to make it a little more diverse so that it can perform at least three different roles.

The first is to get more out of those already in the fold. The second is to go out hunting for totally new people (this is where the ads are most important). The third is to measure the effectiveness of different channels and influencers.

Some of these activities will run alongside each other from the very start. Others will kick in later. It is better to start small rather than go all out with numerous coupons at once. This may leave you making too many assumptions in the early stages and set you on the wrong path.

You may conclude that your influencers aren’t getting you people yet you haven’t selected the right product or you’ve set the minimum order too high. As your coupons run longer, you’ll notice patterns in where their users are coming from and what other groups they belong to.

You can then set about using your theme to make design changes to your site. Get particular products in the featured section. Fine-tune CTA pop-ups and shorten the journey to checkout.

Author

Diane Eunice Narciso

Diane Eunice Narciso is a content marketer, strategist, and writer who's skilled and passionate about marketing, social media, eCommerce, etc. And is also an expert in sales and business development nurturing strategic partnerships and collaborations.