Designing coupons is an effective way to display your creative side. But there is one thing certain that all coupons should contain some features on the coupons whether the coupons are for products or services.
If you succeed in designing the right coupons, you can bring repeated business, attract potential customers, and sell your merchandise at low discounts than spending heavy money on costly campaigns.
In this article, we will learn about how to design an effective coupon.
Table of Contents
Components of an effective coupon Ad
Followings are the strategies that can be built to make your coupon more tempting. Let’s learn how to make coupon effective.
#1 Text
The text on the coupon should convey the message without overwhelming people with too much text. The information on coupon should be able to answer all the concerns of your audience. It should be able to answer all the questions such as when, what, how, and where.
No one can deny the importance of image on the coupon as it will grab the attention of your customers quickly. But the text is also important as it will provide all the necessary information to your customers and will guide them to take actions.
The information such as expiration date, title, and terms and conditions should be mentioned clearly on the coupon. As we have learned before the clear text will showcase your honesty.
#2 Visual appeal:
Images are an important component of coupons. Colorful and attractive imagery will compel your customers to read the text on the coupon. Design your coupon in a stylish and eye-catching way.
Put the images of your products to intrigue your customers. You can also take professional assistance to design your coupons.
#3 Tied to holidays:
Tie your coupon promotion to a holiday will be a good move for your business. Most people usually go on shopping on holidays to spend time with their family and buy gifts for their family. They would love to get a discount coupon to buy things.
Don’t miss the opportunity of the holiday season to lure your customers to come to your store.
#4 Appeal for action:
Your coupons must be able to direct your customers to take particular actions. The design of your coupon must include the call of action.
Mandatory things for a Coupon
1) Text is written on the coupon
Don’t feel tempted to over-crowd your coupon with images and don’t forget to pay attention to the text that you are going to put on it. Make sure that your coupon must contain information such as the location of your store, working hours, your website, and a contact number to locate you easily.
If your store’s location is difficult to locate, then don’t refrain from including a guide map for directions to your store. Make sure that all the information on the coupon must be visible. Mention all the restrictions on your coupon.
Your customers will feel irritated if they will visit your store on the wrong day or wrong time of the day just because you have mentioned restrictions like “not valid on weekdays” or “not valid on peak hours” etc.
If you are honest with your conditions and mention them clearly than people will trust you and will trust in your business, you can refer to coupons of some organization such as Best Buy and target to learn about “what not to do” in coupon design.
These coupons are filled with tiny prints of how and what their coupons can be used and restrictions on the coupons.
Keep in mind the market you are dealing with when you decide about the font and color of the text on the coupon. For example, if you are targeting senior citizens, then there are chances that they could be visually impaired and if you are targeting men, then 7-10% of men are color blind and can’t see a red or green color.
2) Coupon Expiration Date
Don’t forget to mention the expiration date on the coupon. Expiration dates make your customers consume coupons fast. Otherwise, they would save them to use for a rainy day. Make sure that your mention expiration date on the coupon clearly.
Design Tips for Coupons
Your coupon should be colorful and contain at least image. The coupon which has images displaying particular products are more likely to grab the attention of people. If you are distributing coupons for services that show the images of happy and satisfied people on coupons.
According to a survey, people like more and respond more to the images of people than generic images. For example, an insurance company will make more credit if their coupons show an image of a happy family in their new home.
Learn from the coupons of your competitors. It is important for you to learn about the strategies of your competitors. You can do this by analyzing the coupons of your competitors.
For example, most of the grocery store five away coupons with 50% discount or buy one get one on weekends to keep their stock moving.
How to design your coupon?
Now, as we have learned about different components of coupon. The next step is to learn about how to design your coupon.
#1 Make the use of graphic design tools:
You can find many graphic design tools online that you can use free of cost. These tools let the novice and professional create designs alike. There are many graphic design tools such as Canva and photoshop, that you can be used to design your coupons.
#2 Take the services of professional designers on freelancer sites:
You can use the services of professionals to design your coupons in case you don’t have time to create on your own. You can get the services of starting at $5.
#3 Decide terms and conditions for the coupon:
Decide and terms and condition for your coupon and mention them on coupon.
How to make your coupon grab Attention?
So far, you have learned about how to design your coupons and what information to include in your coupon.
#1 Use the psychology of discount:
Most people shop only tempted by reading the discount sign and don’t pay any attention to do the math. That means you can make your offer as valuable as possible. For example, if you are selling an item of worth $250, then $75 off will seem more attractive than 30% off.
Even both amounts are the same and offering the same discount. You can learn about various strategies by experimenting with your approaches to distribute coupons.
#2 Create Urgency:
According to a survey, 83% of people shop unplanned when they come to offer any offer. You should take advantage of this behavior to do more business. This behaviour of customers can be triggered by putting text like “12 hours flash sales”, “offer valid till stock lasts,” etc.
Other than that, you can put a restriction on the validity of coupon by limiting the validity of coupon for first 50 customers. For example, the first 50 customers will be given 30% off. This approach can boost sales using coupons.
#3 Provide a sense of exclusivity:
People like exclusive deals. They want to feel that they are receiving something special using your coupons. You can use tactics such as sending coupons to social media followers or your most frequent customers. The tip requires you to segment your audience properly.
Therefore, plan carefully on how can you include exclusivity in your coupon promotion scheme.
#4 Individualize and personalize your coupons:
This is one of the most effective strategies, but it is very difficult to implement. But if you succeed in implementing this strategy successfully, it can prove to be the most successful strategy. In this strategy, you provide the right coupon to the right person at the right time.
That means you personalize coupon according to your loyal customers. For example, there is no benefit in giving the discount coupon to the customer after they have bought a face wash three days before. But if you give the coupon to customers five to six days after the purchase of face wash will be a good deal.
On the other hand, you can give coupons on other related products such as moisturizing cream or facial cream, etc. Send personalized coupons to your customers using their email address and give them offers on the products that they would love.
#5 Focus on Coupon distribution:
No matter how good offer you are giving by your coupons, they would be useless if your customers don’t know about them. Therefore, you should plan your strategy days before implementing it.
Think about the different platform such as Facebook, websites, Twitter, newspapers, magazine, etc. where your customers can know about your coupons. Using an email list of your customers, you can send personalized offers to your customers.
Plan strategies to provide offers to your target audience. Use every possible way to make your coupons as public as possible.
Where to Distribute your Coupons?
The channels to distribute your coupons largely depends on the type of business run by you. For example, an e-commerce store will see more success if it distributes coupons online. On the other hand, a brick and mortar store should distribute coupons offline.
They can give away coupons to the walk-in customers of your store. However, it can also consider the online platform to distribute coupons. But coupons should be distributed on the local websites so that more and more people can use them.
Let us learn about the different platforms to distribute coupons.
#1 Send Coupons via mail:
Let us consider you run a pet store, and you want to distribute 5000 discount coupons on pet food. You can use various postcard services to send out coupons. For example, you can use VistaPrint for getting your coupons designed, print, and mailed at $2000.
You can also send out postcards to your loyal customers by using their contact information.
#2 Include Coupons in local Newspapers/Magazines:
Print coupons were first used by Coca Cola company in 1887 since then print coupons are used world widely.
However, digital coupons are used frequently and are easy to redeem, but print coupons still make the 44% off the coupon market. Many people look forward to printing coupons and feel happy to redeem them. According to a survey, a total of 70% of people still prefers print coupons from newspapers and magazines.
#3 Post Coupons on Social Media:
You can make the use of social media accounts such as Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, to share your coupons with your friends, family, and followers. Put enough efforts to make your coupons compelling so that more and more people use them.
One benefit of using social media is that coupons can be shared very easily and can be received by thousands of people. You can use various strategies such as “Get a 20% discount on your next purchase by referring to friends”.
#4 Send Coupons to customers using your Email list:
Offering coupons are the best way to make your customers visit you again and again. You can use your email list to reach your customers and send coupons to them. You can send more personalized offers to your customers using an email list.
In addition to this, you will get the advantage of the privacy to because your coupons will not be public and your competitors can not know about your strategies.
#5 Distribute coupons Online:
There are different ways to distribute coupons online. You can use free coupon hosting websites such as RetailMeNot. You can post coupons on this website and share about it in your store. Therefore, only your existing customers can take advantage of these coupons.
Otherwise, you can distribute your coupons on the website “Coupon.com.” You can narrow down the reach of your coupon using zip code. In this way, you can acquire new customers in your local area.
In the end, I want to suggest you that don’t create a simple discount coupon with 10% discount. Spend a good amount of time to plan your strategy by weighing costs and profits. Spend a good amount of time to plan your strategy. Use your strategy to bring more customers to your store and make them spend more money from their pockets.
You can also get inspired and get new ideas by looking at the coupon code examples in our Marketing Tools Discounts section.
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