Everybody loves coupons – but too many coupons and discounts devalue your brand.

When a store overuses coupons, it’s often a sign of an inferior product or a marketing person who’s out of ideas. It can also send the message that you don’t believe in your products, and they’re not worth what you’re charging.

The best approach on coupons? Use them as a way to drive desired behaviors or to reward customers. Our friends at PHLEARN, the number one Photoshop and photography tutorial website in the world, gave us some good tips based on their vast experience running a successful education platform.

Driving behavior

Encouraging customers to perform the actions you want – that is, to spend more – isn’t always easy.

Let’s say you want to encourage your customers to increase their cart size (the behavior). You can use discounting as a tool: If they add two products to their cart, you have a perfect moment to offer a discount for adding a third. Once they add a third, mention that another discount kicks in at five products.

You can do the same based on cart totals; the Cart Notices extension can help with this.

Rewarding your customers

Your customers are the most important part of your business – it wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for them. The least you can do is to reward them for trusting you with their hard earned money.

Post-purchase is a perfect moment to reward them and offer a discount on their next purchase. But this strategy will only work with a specific timeline – people will rarely use a coupon that never expires. If it expires in 14 days, however, the chance of redemption increases significantly.

Personalization is the key

Customers have different tastes and perspectives and are more inclined to buy particular types of product. That’s why you shouldn’t offer everyone the exact same discount.

Use coupons and campaigns to market to specific customers, especially via email. That means marketing based on their previous actions, purchases, and the pages they visit. If you target a coupon at the right moment (for example, after they have added something to their cart), and with the right message (based on customer’s behavior), you can convert with a smaller discount.

When offering everyone the same coupon, you might find that 25-35% off seems to be the only amount that works. However, a highly-personalized campaign might convert just as well at only 10% off.

That’s a wrap

We hope that we’ve inspired you to avoid these common eCommerce couponing pitfalls. We’d love to hear about your experiences using coupons – both good and bad – in the comments below. Thanks for reading!