As your brand grows, you may find that your coupon codes are getting shared all over the internet. While this obviously isn’t ideal, go ahead and pat yourself on the back - your brand has gained enough recognition and demand that there’s a community of shoppers working tirelessly to find and share your coupon codes with other shoppers. Unfortunately, this means your coupon codes could end up on mass coupon sites like RetailMeNot. Gross.
Thankfully, there are several ways to combat coupon sites and hijack their traffic.
First, if you’re using a heatmaps tool like Lucky Orange, you may find that shoppers are making it to checkout, clicking on the “discount” field, and then bouncing entirely.
This typically means they’ll see the option to add a discount, pause checkout, and then Google “your store” + “coupon” which leads them to coupon sites like RetailMeNot. It’s a common consumer strategy to attempt to pick up a quick discount before completing a purchase. And if it’s occurring on your site, it could be costing you money and impacting the customer experience.
So, the goal is to hijack some of this coupon traffic to enforce more appropriate discounting while protecting your brand image.
Your first option is to create a new landing page with a “coupon” path or slug such as “mywebsite.com/coupon”. It seems counterintuitive but stick with us here.
You’ll then add a coupon or two that you actually want people to use. Perhaps a free shipping coupon for spending over a certain dollar amount so you can increase your average order value (AOV) while giving the customer a win in the form of a discount they’ve been searching for. This gives you more control over the customer experience and discounting.
Here’s an example from Outdoor Voices offering a 20% discount code in exchange for the shopper’s email address. This gives them the opportunity to remarket to the prospective customer in the event they don't complete their purchase - an opportunity they wouldn’t otherwise have if a shopper copied a discount code from a coupon site and didn’t make it to checkout.
Bad Birdie Golf built a creative dedicated discount code page offer that gives shoppers $20 off but they get something in return: a second customer.
And if you don’t want to offer any coupons whatsoever, you can still create the “mywebsite.com/coupon” page and instead explain your company mission and why you don’t offer coupons.
Here’s an example from Allbirds. Simply Google “allbirds discount code” and you’ll see their coupon landing page is the first organic result.
Note the title “The Truth about Allbirds Coupons”. It catches attention and entices the discount seeker to read more. Who doesn’t want to know “the truth” behind the policy, especially after taking the time to hunt out a discount code?
The page is simple in nature. It acknowledges the fact that they don’t offer discounts and then links the customer to continue shopping.
This strategy helps bring the distracted customer back to their site while setting proper expectations about their discount policy.
Lastly, instead of creating a dedicated coupon landing page, you can advertise against “your brand” + “discount code”, offer a discount, and then take the customer right back to your site to continue shopping.
While you’re potentially paying twice for traffic, it provides a better customer experience and could be more profitable than the coupon site offers (depending on your economics), so make sure you run the numbers before jumping into this one.
This Playbook was inspired by the below Ben Jabbawy + Privy Podcast episode 👇
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