Coupon or discount codes your customers enter during the ecommerce checkout process can help your business monitor and measure marketing and advertising effectiveness and make better promotional decisions.
For a professional marketer, measuring a marketing campaign should be one of the first considerations with every new advertising or promotional plan. Without measurement, you won’t really know what worked and you cannot properly justify continued investment.
Without measurement you may find your business in John Wanamaker’s classic dilemma: “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.”
One way to monitor (or at least benchmark) how well your marketing promotions are working is to use coupon or discount codes. Shoppers are familiar with coupons and entering online coupon codes. When you limit the distribution of a given coupon code to a specific promotion or marketing tactic you can measure that tactic.
Example Coupon Campaign
Imagine you own an online pet supply store that sells everything from leashes and puppy shampoo to 40-pounds bags of pet food and small packages of dog treats.
Your business is about to start a sale on dog treats, and your marketing team has decided to place banner ads on several websites, including dog training blogs, breeder sites, and pet travel sites.
For each site, your marketing team develops a specific coupon code that is logically connected to the banner ad content. A banner ad with the headline “Because you love to see her smile” might use the coupon code “MakeSmiles” on one website and “ForSmiles” on another.
In each case, when…
