Coupon Manager Gets an Upgrade and Introduces Single-Use Coupons

According to a January 2009 comScore survey, over 50% of consumers are using coupons more often as a way to cut back on their shopping expenses. Given how important coupons are for driving sales during these tough economic times, we are excited to announce that we’ve just launched improvements to coupon functionality.

First off, you’ll notice the Coupon Manager looks different. We’ve added sortable columns, pagination, filters, and have also included four more fields in the main view which will make it easier to manage and monitor your coupon offers. We’ve also added the ability to download order details for any coupon, regardless of the number of orders it has generated. And, you can also download coupon details for use with external applications.

Single-use coupons

We know that merchants need to create compelling offers that can’t be abused or overly distributed and also need to create coupons for unique one-off situations. To address this, we’ve introduced single-use coupons. This new coupon type allows you to create coupons that can each be redeemed one time only.

Single-use coupons are best suited for rewarding loyal customers with exclusive offers, enticing specific customer segments, and improving customer service by extending special offers on a per-customer basis. The coupons in each series get reported on in aggregate, so you can see how your campaigns perform, just like you would with a standard (non-single-use) coupon.

Let’s say you want to launch an email campaign to a set of 500 customers who have bought big-ticket items from you in the past, but haven’t bought from you recently. You want to create a generous offer because these customers need motivation for shopping with you again. You decide to create a 25% off coupon with no minimum order amount. Without single-use coupons, you’d risk this offer possibly being posted to a coupon or social networking site, forwarded via email from friend to friend, or used repeatedly by the same customers. Single-use coupons allow you to create more aggressive offers for appropriate customer segments, limiting your risk by knowing that each coupon you send out can only be used once.

Similarly, you might want to offer a single-use coupon to a customer who had an issue with a previous order as a “make-good” – it might be worth it to you to give them a $10 coupon for a future order to mend the relationship, but you wouldn’t want this coupon to be floating out there for anyone to scoop up.

Product exclusions

We’ve heard from many of you about the need to not only create coupons that apply to certain products (which you could already do) but also to specifically exclude items. Now, not only can you exclude individual products, but the new structure of selecting items to include or exclude allows you to select the items within an entire category all at once.

Let’s say you sell a few video game systems and thousands of video games. You want to set up a promotion that discounts all the video games, but not the systems. With product exclusions, you can easily create a coupon that excludes just those few systems.

Greater flexibility in coupon naming

Coupon names used to have to start with a letter. No more! We’re opening this up and you can now begin codes with numbers as well. If you want to name a coupon for 20 percent off dog leashes “20offleash”, go right ahead.

Coupon search

With all these new features, we’re pretty sure you’ll want to create more coupons. In order to make it easier for you to find coupons you’ve previously created (or find a unique instance of a single-use coupon) we’ve added the ability to search for a coupon in the Coupon Manager. The new search function will allow you to search for a coupon, a coupon series, or a single instance of a single-use coupon. In the case of a single-use coupon, results will even show if it hasn’t been redeemed yet.

Coupons are an effective way to drive sales and keep your customers coming back. These new features will both help you manage your coupon campaigns and allow you to create compelling campaigns that capture the attention of your existing customers. Now, more than ever, maximizing your conversion rate and generating sales from existing customers is incredibly important.

Happy Couponing!

Laurie Briggs
Yahoo! Small Business