Coupon Essay

533 Words2 Pages

A couple of weeks ago, we talked about ways web hosting businesses can increase their sales output by combining coupon marketing with affiliate marketing. Most web hosting companies follow the standard procedure: they send their coupon offers to the affiliate partners, who then promote these discounts via their newsletters or blogs. These vouchers generally reduce the price of the service by 20 to 50 percent, and the affiliate partners grab their share of the revenue.

Now, one reader asked me an interesting question: if acquiring new customers is the whole purpose of coupon marketing, how do web hosting companies identify them? They have no way of knowing whether their vouchers are used by new or existing customers. For example, let's say 80 percent of the people who redeem the vouchers are existing customers. You might have sold them your …show more content…

However, certain businesses can still make money on it, either because their margins are relatively high or because their customers end up spending more money than they planned on. Since web hosting companies are selling software, they fall into this group as well. If they create their own server and limit each customer to 50MB of space on it, they'll only have to worry about maintenance expenses. This kind of product doesn't require delivery or shipping, which means that bringing in little or no new business doesn't necessarily lead to revenue losses.

Voucher Codes vs. Full Price

When it comes to giving voucher codes to customers who would've probably bought the services at full price, most businesses can't draw any concrete conclusions. We can, however, make an educated guess that some percentage of returning customers would not have come back without a voucher. Plus, it's important to remember that the web hosting industry itself is somewhat of an outlier. A lot of web hosting companies make more money by retaining inactive customers over gaining new ones.

The 80/20

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