Mailbeez offers your eCommerce store some pretty amazing email marketing tools, of which coupon creation and distribution abilities are just one stand out feature. However, when sending coupon campaigns, it is vital that you have set goals in mind, and this post will give you some tips on how to focus your efforts to maximize sales and revenue when offering discounts.

Rewarding the regular customer – very good or very bad?

If a customer buys 10 guitars from your store, should you provide a coupon towards their 11th? On the one hand the customer has proven their loyalty, and clearly does not need any extra motivation to purchase from you. On the other, the online world is competitive, plus of course, the customer has bought a large amount from you. Hmm, decisions!

Our opinion is that rewarding loyalty at some point is always a sales winner, but the essential element is to make sure the customer knows they are being rewarded for their loyalty. This reminds us of a lesson we were once taught by an experienced business owner: “if you do a favor for someone in business, let them know”.

The Mailbeez solution to reward loyalty is via the handy Mailbeez Re-Order Advanced module, which can be configured to reward a customer after a preset number of orders with a predefined coupon amount. Fully automated and personalized, this is an ideal, ‘hands off’ way to reward your best customers, without the hassle of manual management.

The occasional customer – the key to extra revenue, or a big waste of time?

Perhaps the hardest customer of all to motivate, and one that neither shows great loyalty to your store, nor orders regularly. Offering coupons to this type of customer is a balancing act – a generous high value coupon might result in one order, but perhaps not a series of orders, whereas a small coupon may well be completely ignored.

In instances like this, our advice would be to offer a large coupon (and only in your industry will you know the margin you can afford to give away here), but with a high minimum order value. That way if the customer does order, you manage to recoup a good level of revenue which can to a degree offset lost margin, especially if you are then able to achieve better prices from your suppliers through the sale of greater units.

The Mailbeez module to use for occasional customers is Winback Advanced, a fully automated, personalized and configurable module that will generate offer coupons to customers who have not placed an order for a predetermined time, or in other words, occasional customers!

The ‘created an account but never bought’ customer – a sale waiting to happen?

In the life of an eCommerce store owner, every order is a small spark of excitement in a day filled with a million tasks. One of those tasks is a weekly analysis of missed sales opportunities, and none come much bigger than customers who created an account, but did not go on to order. In these instances, immediately offering a coupon can be the wrong message to send out, and could actually harm the integrity of your brand (yes retailers, you are a brand, don’t forget it) and future potential to achieve full margins once a discount precedent is set.

Whilst the Mailbeez No Purchase Advanced module is the tool to use to email new customers who did not go on to order, it would actually be wise to utilize its multi-step architecture to email in the first instance with a friendly service response in order to determine if you can offer any help, and if no response is forthcoming (the response of course being an order), only then provide a discount coupon in the second follow up email.