With busy lifestyles today, time is of the essence for most online shoppers. When they decide to shop online, they want to do it quickly and get back to their daily routine. That means if your online store doesn’t offer features that make shopping easier for them, they will click away and head to the competition. One particular aspect of your online store to put more emphasis on to make shopping easier for potential customers is the use of coupons. Most customers love to use coupons today, and so, to succeed as an online merchant in this day and age, you must use coupon plugins that come with the latest customizable features, including:
- Social Share Buttons
Social media is big today. In fact, it’s where most people hang out the most. Statistically, there are more than 2.7 billion social media users today, with Facebook and Instagram leading the way. Social media is not just a platform for people to interact and share their daily experiences. It’s a platform that helps businesses harness customers to boost sales. They do this by sharing their marketing messages and products to those platforms, and in turn, draw more customers to their online stores.
While it was difficult to share marketing messages and products to different social media platforms a few years ago, technology has made it possible today. In fact, almost all websites and online stores come with social share buttons to enable merchants to share their marketing messages and products to different social media platforms with a single click. And this capability can also be applied to coupons. Almost all coupon plugins come with social share buttons to enable online merchants to share their coupon code offers to various social media sites instantly.
- Responsive Design
Today, the majority of people own Smartphones. And they use these devices to shop online anywhere, anytime. The majority of coupon plug-ins in the market today comes with responsive designs. Responsive design means the Smartphone user can view the coupon the same way they view it using a computer. This means that they can view the text, images, and layout of the coupon without having to adjust their Smartphone screens. Customers will click away and move to the next online store if they are not able to read and see the contents of a coupon properly. Web developers have responded by designing coupon plug-ins with responsive designs.
- Coupon Expiry Countdown
This is one of the features of a coupon that most online businesses are using today. Expiry dates are vital when setting up coupons for your e-commerce website. They create a sense of urgency that drives customers to buy quickly. The regular coupon plugins come with a static expiry date. But the coupon plugins developed these days have a coupon expiry countdown that shows prospective customers the number of hours, minutes and seconds left before the coupon offer expires. This can be a greater motivator for the customer to buy.
- Capability To Harness Customers’ Details
The new coupons come with exit-intent technology that reveals the popup form when customers want to exit your e-commerce website. This pop up will allow them to see the discounts offered and the majority will likely fill out the form to get the coupon code. This technology has helped many online merchants to grow their email lists and take their businesses to another level quickly. And the awesome part is that you can easily integrate the coupon with Active Campaign and MailChimp to quickly grow your email list.
- Affiliate Links
Affiliate marketing is increasingly becoming a popular method for online business to generate more sales. It’s a marketing strategy whereby an online business owner rewards an affiliate for directing visitors to their website to buy products or services. In simple terms, the affiliate gets a commission when they refer someone to the website to buy a certain product or service. Today’s coupons come with affiliate links that affiliates can use to refer people to sign up and receive coupon codes. Sites such as CouponCause.com spend a lot of money on paid advertising to get the coupons in from of interested people. Affiliate marketing is one of the most effective ways to attract a ton of visitors to your site and make more sales.
- Location-Based Geofencing Feature
Most coupons developed today come with a location-based geofencing feature. This feature enables you to automatically send messages to customers depending on their location. That means you can customize your marketing messages according to their location. The feature will also let you know where most of your customers are located to allow for micro-targeting.
- Coupon POS integration
Coupon POS integration enables you to process mobile coupons directly into your point of sales systems. You can then validate them easily after use. Entering the codes and validating them manually is a daunting task. Coupon POS integration saves a lot of time and effort that can be directed to other profitable aspects of the business.
- Add Products On Coupon Apply
This feature lets you add selected products to the shopping cart automatically for applied coupons. It also allows you to easily override the price, or change the coupon discount criteria from a fixed dollar amount to percentage and vice versa. It also allows you to customize the coupon to add multiple products.
- Multi-Language Feature
E-commerce has enabled customers from any part of the world to access products that they love worldwide. So, if you’re an online business owner, you need to cater to all those customers regardless of their language. Luckily, today’s coupons come with multi-language functionality to enable just about any customer, from any part of the world to buy conveniently.
Bottom-line
Majority of people who shop online these days love coupons. In fact, according to a survey by ReailMeNot, a record 96% of customers today routinely use coupons. Online merchants have discovered this and are now investing in coupons by implementing smart coupon technologies that are feature-rich and offer an even better shopping experience for customers in order to boost sales. So, when implementing coupons as a marketing strategy on your site, ensure that the coupon plugin you choose has all these smart features.
