Coupons are the small vouchers or tickets issued by the sellers to offer customers discounts when they shop from them. Coupons have been used for many years to increase customer traffic at stores by attracting them with multiple discounts and offers. They are not just beneficial for customers but also for the sellers. Coupons have proved themselves time and again to be an important aspect of the eCommerce industry.
Importance of coupons in digital marketing
Coupons are an integral component of online shopping. They not only reduce the cost of orders for the customers, but they also attract more customers to your online store. According to the latest coupon statistics, 90% of consumers use them at least once in their life. This data reveals that every second customer tends to use an online coupon while making an online purchase.
There are reports that suggest that people are more likely to complete their online orders when they use coupons. And more than 50% of new customers are likely to visit your shop when they get a welcoming discount. Digital marketing is thriving on online coupons at the moment and it will become more dependent on digital coupons in the coming years.
Considering the importance of coupon marketing, there should be some procedures and means to effectively use them. The most important technology impacting this mode of marketing is artificial intelligence AI.
Artificial intelligence and machine learning in coupon marketing
It is the age of artificial intelligence that has been driving all the businesses at a noticeable place and in no time will take over most of the industries. Artificial intelligence has been transforming the domain of digital marketing. AI offers instant personal customer services that help customers find the right products and discounts.
The internet is brimming with data from people all over the world and AI is utilizing this (with the users permission) to bring the best products and offers to them. AI provides this information to the sellers and with its machine learning techniques, this information is used in the future as well. This makes it easy for businesses to organize their coupon marketing campaigns according to the likes and dislikes of their shoppers.
Backing up customers data for future coupons
AI is a complex system of programs that work by extracting patterns and insights from a large collection of data and uses it to make decisions. It collects data from the websites people use, unify it, and makes assumptions about their interests. This information, predicts what type of products the people would be interested in and provides them with coupons to shop for them.
This data is very useful for online businesses to attract their customers with their desired deals. The more data your AI acquires, the better itll be able to bring people to their desired page and desired discounts.
AI using coupons for customer retention
It is not a hard task to attract people to business by giving them coupons. The real task is to make them stay after their first purchase. Many customers tend to avail their first order coupons and never return. It is tiresome for them to look for coupons, so they dont spend more time in your store. Many businesses fail to retain their customers after the first purchases. Some customers even compare the coupons with other coupon offering websites to get maximum discounts.
AI is helping businesses solve this problem. Instead of making customers search for the best coupons on their orders, AI automatically provides the best suitable coupons at the time of check out at one platform and makes it easier for customers. In this way, they become returning customers.
Predict worthwhile targets to send coupons
It is important for online businesses to send coupons to customers that are worth sending them. By repeatedly sending coupons to people that dont benefit the business can actually result in loss. AI predicts customers that will use coupons but that is not enough. Coupons should be sent to the customers that will return to the store.
If not, you will end up sending them to coupon hungry customers and it will create negative feedback on your business. Instead, the focus of your coupon campaign should be those loyal customers that will return to your store after getting a discount. Thats why AI intelligence analyzes the customers information using machine learning to find those coupon-worthy customers.
Purchase history to focus coupon marketing campaign
It is important to know the purchase history of the customers targeted in your coupon campaign. Specifically, their history regarding their behavior before and after they receive a coupon. The important details about the purchase history of a customer that AI collects are:
- The number of purchases that a customer has made
- Sum of money the customer has spent on the products
- How many products the customer has bought without coupons and discounts
- How often the customer visits the store
- How often does the customer use coupons
- How much money the customer has saved through coupons
This amount of data from various customers helps AI analyze the onsite behavior of the customers. AI predicts the moves of these customers and filters out the ones that are worth sending coupons to and increases the businesss revenue. This will reduce the amount the business spends on coupon marketing campaigns.
Make hesitant buyers your regular customers
One of the best features of artificial intelligence is that it can analyze the customers on-site behavior by the time they spend on the store, the pages they move around, and the time they spend on particular sections. In this way, the AI can predict the hesitant buyers who spend their time browsing through the online stores, window shopping, wondering if they should buy a particular item or not.
Whatever the reason might be for their not completing the orders, these buyers can generate great revenues if they are encouraged to make the purchase. With the help of AI, these hesitant buyers can receive occasional coupons which will encourage them to shop from the store. This is just another way how AI can help you build efficient digital coupon marketing campaigns.
Automation of coupon marketing:
To extend the business and make it available for a larger audience, using and searching coupons should be made easier. Just like the logistics business, coupon searching should be a point on. With the implementation of AI in digitalized coupon marketing, the coupons should be available with a simple search of a query.
There should be a self-learning algorithm that will update itself regularly according to the changing trends in discounts to let the customers avail of the maximum discounts. An enhancement would be to have the most suitable coupon according to the order automatically added at the time of check-out.
Chatbots helping in coupon marketing
One of the most significant advances brought by AI in customer-facing business is the emergence of chatbots. These chatbots have altered the outlook on customer-seller interactions. These chatbots reduce the human slack up to 90% as they provide 24/7 customer service. They instantly respond to the questions and queries of the customers.
But in addition to that, they perform another vital task. They analyze the behavior of their customers and extract intricate information about them. This could lead to the creation of personable digital coupons in the e-commerce marketing industry. The chatbots will interact with their customers and will be able to create personable coupons specifically made for them. In this way, the old physical coupons with online codes will be in the past and the chatbots created, QR code scannable coupons, privately sent to customers will take charge of the digital coupon marketing.
Voice-activated assistants in coupon marketing
In the era of artificial intelligence, coupon marketing has become more conversational. The emergence of voice-activated assistants will prove to be a great incentive towards the digitalization of coupons. In 2018, Target issued 15$ voice-activated coupons to the customers who ordered through google express and said spring into Target into the voice-activated coupon option at the time of checkout. This opened gates for new possibilities in the field of online coupon marketing.
With the emergence of voice-activated coupons, a larger audience would be able to benefit from them. It is estimated that by the end of next year, almost 50% of all the searches would be done through voice. It means AI providing us voice-generated coupons will be inevitable.
Wrapping up
The introduction of AI to the e-commerce business not only has sprouted it to grow but it has been providing new and innovative ideas. It has been proved by various points how AI has strengthened the coupon marketing campaign especially by the use of chatbots and voice searches. Now that you have the right information about building more efficient coupons with AI, it is now your job to utilize them efficiently and explore new horizons in business technologies.
