We know that employee time is precious. Every day brings its own difficulties for your team and we know it can be hard to minimize distractions. Even simple tasks like marking used coupons as redeemed in your FetchRev dashboard can be difficult, and we get that! However, if you would humor me, I want to take a minute to make a case for why it’s so important to redeem your coupons.
Any type of marketing effort requires the tracking of your return on investment (ROI). Some marketing makes this easier than others, but getting as close as we can to identifying a true ROI is critically important. We can’t improve what we can’t track. Often times what I hear from our customers is: “It’s not worth the time it takes to redeem a coupon.” Or perhaps you simply don’t mind if a customer decides to use a coupon more than once. That’s a fair point. If that sounds like you, I’m here to encourage you to rethink redemptions, and here’s why:
- Effective marketing is trackable marketing – Tracking the effectiveness of marketing campaigns has been a problem as long as marketing has been around. However, it’s critical if we’re to establish an ROI or to determine if we should make changes to a campaign to make it more effective. This is what we call A/B testing. This is the process of comparing two campaigns to determine which is more effective, thereby allowing us to hone our message to make it as effective as possible. Sometimes it’s as simple as how an offer is worded. Is offering a percentage discount more effective than a dollar amount? What if you send your offers on a Monday vs. Friday? Without marking our coupons as redeemed, we have no way of knowing which of our efforts is producing the most revenue, and therefore what we should be doing more of.
- Deals should expire – The deals you offer your customer base should inspire some excitement, and motivate them to come back in your door sooner, spending again. An unexpiring coupon can devalue your brand in the long term by giving the impression that your prices are too high. But limited time offers can be an excellent way to provide a sense of urgency and remind your customers about what they’re missing out on. The FetchRev platform is built to drive this sense of urgency.
Steven Shieh, Manager of Customer Success at FetchRev had this to say:
“An expiration date creates urgency. “Use by this date” gets customers thinking about their calendar and plans, which causes the deal to stick in their mind. Additionally, An expiration date triggers email reminders in the FetchRev platform that will be automatically be sent out 7 days and 2 days before a coupon expires. Most people claim and forget; adding an expiration reminds them to use it.”
- Direct Dollar Attribution – This is a fantastic feature that I believe is one of the most under-utilized in the FetchRev platform. This is the ability to not only mark your coupons as redeemed, but also to record how much the customer spent when they came in. This empowers you as the owner to know exactly the bottom line revenue number that each coupon produced. For instance, when you send out a coupon for 10% off the next visit, when your team goes to mark the coupon as redeemed, the system will also prompt them to enter the total amount spent. This simple action will allow you to see exactly what each campaign was able to produce down to the penny. That is effective marketing!
