Extending the Life of Single-Use Coupons

Since the release of our single-use coupons feature at the end of February, coupon series expiration has been a popular question. If you haven’t seen answers to some of the blog comments, or if you haven’t yet visited our help page to learn more about coupon series expiration, this post may help answer some of your questions about how to extend the life of a single-use coupon series past six months, and why limited-time coupons can be better for your store’s sales and revenue.

Changing the expiration date

If you’re using single-use coupons, you’ve likely noticed that when you create a coupon series, you must set an expiration date up to a maximum of six months into the future. So if you created a single-use coupon series today (April 3), you could set an expiration date for any date up until October 2 of this year. Thinking ahead, some of you have asked the very valid question, "What if I want the coupons to be good for a longer amount of time?"

As you approach a coupon series expiration date, you can edit the series to extend its lifespan. Each time you edit a coupon series, you can extend the expiration date up to six months from that day (the edit date), to a maximum of one year (365 days) from the date the series was created. You can edit this date as many times as you wish until you reach that one-year maximum. All that’s a bit of a mouthful, so here’s an example:

• April 3, 2009 — I create a single-use coupon series, good until October 2, 2009.
• On August 15, 2009, I decide that I want the coupon instances in this series to be valid for a longer amount of time. I locate the coupon series in Coupon Manager, and edit its expiration date. Since I’m editing the coupon series on August 15, I can extend the expiration date to any future date up until February 14, 2010, which is six months away.
• On February 1, 2010, I once again decide that I want this coupon series to stick around for a couple more months. When I edit the coupon series this time, I can extend its expiration date until April 2, 2010, which is one year from the date the series was created.

One thing to keep in mind is that all coupon instances in a series will inherit the extended expiration date. For step-by-step information about editing a coupon series expiration date, please visit our help page.

Why should I create limited time offers, anyway?

In a word: incentive. When you create a coupon offer, the intent is to drive business. In cases where a coupon offer is extended as a customer service tool or apology, the main intent is to keep a customer’s business rather than have them turn to a competitor. Again, you’d like them to return to your store and to purchase your products. Creating a limited-time offer gives customers more motivation to visit your store within a given timeframe, to remember that they’ve received the coupon offer rather than setting it aside, and ultimately, to redeem the coupon with a purchase. In the current economy, incentive to buy in the immediate future is simply good for business.

If you haven’t yet used the single-use coupons feature, we encourage you to start. Remember, creating different coupon offers as individual series can help you experiment with what works best for enticing customers to buy from your store. The coupon series conversion rate, along with information about associated orders and revenue, can all be found in your Coupon Manager.

If you’re using single-use coupons and have a success story you’d like to share, please leave a comment or send us an email. Your store may be included in a future blog post.

Jennifer Farwell
Yahoo! Small Business