This is the fifth and final post in our online coupon series.  You can find the first four at these links:

• The Web is Awash in Coupons
• 8 Good Reasons to Use Online Coupons
• 5 Great Coupon Networks – Plus 5 more
• Groupon Retools Online Coupons

Coupons can generate traffic and sales. Online businesses need to evaluate how using coupons fits into a strategic marketing campaign with benefits that exceed the costs of price competition.

While the strategic issues will be somewhat different for every business, the basic marketing considerations will shape how each business will implement the tactic. These factors are Marketing 101, but we too often hurry past them to launch a tactic.

Know Your Market

Enough said. But it is important to keep this front and center: the people in your market segment shape the way to make your offer, and this is nowhere more true than on the Internet.

Define the Objectives of the Online Coupon

Direct mail campaigns have been used for years to achieve a variety of marketing objectives:

• Market share
• Product introduction
• Customer acquisition
• Sales promotions
• Inventory clearance, and more

You might have similar objectives for your online coupons, but the tracking and communication tools of the Internet can help to make the coupons even more effective. The exact content of the offer, and the timing, duration and placement of the coupon will vary depending on the objective.

Analyze the Economic Value

All online coupons have costs. There are costs in creating them, distributing them, tracking them, and especially in funding the discounts they carry. Often, using coupons will put you in a loss position on those specific items, so the offer is worthwhile only if the longer run economic returns are there. One of the most important reasons to use online coupons is to acquire a new customer, so the lifetime value of a customer is an obvious basic consideration. Do you know the lifetime value of your customer?

Choose the Timing and Duration to Achieve Your Objective

We believe coupons are most effective for short-term boosts in traffic and sales. Using a coupon as a permanent tactic is just a unilateral price cut, and that cannot be good for your business in the longer term. That said, there are businesses that continuously offer coupons, but rotate the offer among products or services. Or, you might have a variety of offers in a variety of channels to reach your market in slightly different ways, while always building the brand.

Tracking and Analysis Always Required!

If you take the trouble to launch a marketing campaign, it is essential to learn from it. Even if it fails to hit your objectives, you will know something more for the next time around.

Coupons have grown up online. Even if you have not used them in the traditional marketing channels, consider them anew as part of your internet marketing strategy. As a source of new customers and new relationships, coupons may prove to be one of your most powerful tactics.

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Is Groupon Right for You?

Groupon seems to work best with local retail businesses like hair salons, restaurants, and clothing stores, but it can be used for many other kinds of products or services. A more analytical way of putting it is that the system favors businesses that can offer a commodity on a volume basis at price points that can attract a lot of people. That said, the price points don’t eliminate the luxury or premium goods segments – if you can handle volume and have local outlets, Groupon might work for you.

Why it Works

Business owners take a steep discount to have a deal of the day available for 24 hours, but they make no upfront payment. Offers are not activated until enough people buy it, ensuring that the deep discount is partially compensated by volume. Since small businesses have been overwhelmed by responses, Groupon encourages limiting the number of coupons available (unless you happen to be a huge national chain like the GAP which could handle 445,000 redemptions). Businesses report acquiring many new customers through Groupon.

How it Works

Groupon expands city by city, starting by recruiting highly rated local businesses that it believes will be successful. It attracts local subscribers, and then pushes a daily email to them with the offer of the day. You can purchase online or on mobile device (iPhone or android app). Once enough people have purchased (the deal is ‘tipped’), you can redeem the offer. Print the coupon to present for discount, or show the vendor your coupon on a mobile device.

Relationships Build Groupon

Personalization helps target offers to you, though you can always browse your city
for more. Groupons direction of evolution is toward more and more social integration as it runs hard to stay ahead of the many competitors it has spawned (including Google).

Groupon has a lot of competitors, the largest of which is LivingSocial. But it is much larger than any competitor, and growing rapidly. If Groupon is active in your market, it is a powerful marketing tactic you should consider.

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Coupons are not a marketing strategy, but as a tactic they might be part of your Inbound Marketing program to help your business be found. Generally, coupons will be used to promote a spike in traffic and sales in the short term, for a variety of marketing purposes, including customer acquisition or inventory clearance.

We do not advise using coupons as part of a permanent tactic for a given product or service. This will simply force you even further into price competition, which is all too easy on the Internet anyway. If you do determine that a short-term boost is the thing you need, here’s a few coupon options you might consider (there are many, many coupon sites on the Internet – these are representative).

• Google Places.  If you have one or more local businesses, chances are you have a Google Places account (if you don’t, set one up before the end of the day). In the very first screen of your Places account, Google invites you to “Attract new customers by creating an offer for your business”.  These offers will display with your listing in localized search results, and they will also display on mobile devices (unless you toggle off that distribution). You will have the options to add an offer code and image if you wish.  Google will even give you a preview of what the printed coupon will look like.
• Valpak.  Valpak has been a giant direct marketing firm for a long time. Now they have an online distribution network you can access to promote your business to the geographic areas you choose (note that Valpak is not your only option in this category – a brief search will yield many coupon networks).  For a local area, just visit the general contact screen and you will be sent to a form that will be submitted to a representative in your area.
• Groupon.  This is the 800-pound gorilla in this category. Google is reputed to have bid recently for Groupon, with a purchase price as high as 6 billion dollars, and was rejected.  Groupon has a unique business model that incorporates a pricing structure that allows a business to pay only for actual sales and leverages the social networks of participants to reach new customers.

Coupons may not be right for you, but they are right for millions of people online who “clip” them to save. It’s worth a thought.

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In a previous post, we’ve mentioned the importance of setting up Goals in Analytics, but here we list a few more ways to tweak your account to make your tracking data more effective.

• Set up “Events” to track outbound links and PDF downloads. Analytics Help can show you how to write custom scripts to modify the links to external pages or PDF documents on the site so Analytics will count how many times they are clicked by your visitors. These action counts will display in your Analytics report under Content/Events at three levels of detail.
• Use your Benchmark report. Most industry verticals are included in this comparative data Analytics provides. You can access a general report that shows your performance on basic measures like visits, pageviews, and bounce rate compared to sites of similar size. Better, choose to share your traffic data with Google and you can choose which industry (and often which industry segment) for which you want to be compared, and get more highly targeted reports relevant to your market niche.  You can use the data to determine which areas of your site need work.
• Do you run an Ecommerce site?  If you do, definitely define the site as Ecommerce in Analytics to get detailed reports on purchases right along with the rest of your traffic data. Your developer or webmaster will know how to connect Analytics to your shopping cart. Analytics will report the value of sales by product or service, SKU, or category, and allows you to compare traffic sources by sales just like any other Goal. This data is perfect for evaluating traffic sources for yield, cost per sale, and sales conversion rate.
• Use Annotations to track when important events take place on your website. Analytics allows you to insert comments by date so you will know when important changes or promotions took place.  You can use this information to evaluate the impacts of different events like email newsletters or specific promotions on your traffic, clicks, and conversions.
• Create Advanced Segments to view important subsets of your data. Navigate to the ‘Advanced Segments’ pulldown at the top of Reports and choose ‘Create a new custom segment’. A screen will open that allows you to select which ‘Dimensions’ and ‘Metrics’ you want to use to define your segment. For example, you can make a segment based on geographic source of visits to be measured by ecommerce performance.  Making several of these segments will generate comparative reports in your main Analytics views so you can see graphically where your best performing traffic comes from.

Analytics keeps adding important features, and still all free. Make use of this data to get the most out of your Inbound Marketing investment.

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Assuming you have a Google Analytics account and a properly-installed tracking code, setting up goal conversions is the next logical step.  Goals are the the primary metric for assessing how well your website fulfills its business objectives so having them setup and setup properly is extremely valuable.

Goal performance can be viewed from the main navigation within your Google Analytics account.  But first, you’ve got to set up those goals. Here how it works:

After you’ve thought of what your goals will be, named your goals, defined the funnel, and given your goals a set value, begin setting them up by following these instructions, which are found within Google’s support area:

1. Sign in to your Google Analytics account

2. Select the account that contains the profile you’ll be creating goals in from the Overview page.

3. Find the profile for which you will be creating goals, and click ‘Edit’ under the ‘Actions’ column.

4. Under the ‘Goals’ section, select one of the four sets to create your goal in (each set contains up to five goals) and click ‘Add goal.’ You can create up to 20 goals if you use all four sets.

5. Enter the goal’s name so that you can quickly recognize it when viewing reports.

6. Turn the goal ‘On’ or ‘Off.’ If you choose ‘On,’ that means you want Google Analytics to track this conversion goal at this time. Turning it ‘Off’ will only make the goal inactive without deleting it.

7. Select the goal’s position. The pull-down menu lets you select a goal’s position from within a set so that you can control the order in which it appears from the ‘Goals’ tab in your reports, or lets you move a goal from one set to another.

8. Decide one of the three types of goals you want. This can be URL Destination, Time on Site, or Pages/Visit. You can learn more about them and how to set up the goals for each here.

9. Once you select the radio button for the goal type, a field for ‘Goal Details’ should appear. To learn how to fill out the fields for each goal type, please refer to this Help Center article.

If your goal is a “URL destination” goal you may also want to set up a funnel so you can view how people move from one page to another on their path to the goal conversion.  For example, if your goal page is a “thank you” page that a visitor lands on once they’ve filled out a contact form and the contact form is available from your service overview page, you will want to create a funnel that starts with the URL of the service page, then the contact form page, then the thank you page.  With a funnel you can see where people drop off on their way to reaching your goal.  Do they drop off at the contact form page?  Or do they ever even make it to the contact form page?  Armed with this information you’ll be able to modify your pages to achieve your desired conversion rate.

Here’s how to set up a funnel, according to Google:

1. After completing the above steps click ‘Yes, create a funnel for this goal.

2. Enter the ‘URL’ of the first page of your conversion funnel. This page should be a page that is common to all users working their way towards your goal. For example, if you are tracking user flow through your checkout pages, do not include a product page as a step in your funnel.

3. Please note: Funnel URLs are treated as regular expressions. For this reason, you can include wildcard characters and use other regular expression methods if you want to match more than a single URL. Learn more about regular expressions.

4. Enter a ‘Name’ for this step.  (Give it a name that helps you remember what the step means.)

5. If this step is a ‘Required step’ in the conversion process, select the checkbox to the right of the step. If this checkbox is selected, users reaching your goal page without travelling through this funnel page will not be counted as conversions.

6. Continue entering goal steps until your funnel has been completely defined. You may enter up to 10 funnel steps, or as few as a single step.

Click Save Changes to create this Goal and funnel, or Cancel to exit without saving.

Now that you know how to set up a goal, give it a try and see for yourself how your website really does perform.  Good luck!  Let us know if you need help.

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You haven’t stopped writing those blog posts, have you? We know how difficult in can be to stay on a disciplined schedule of creating new content to attract prospects to your business.  But the fact is, the more and better content you create, the more and better opportunities you have to attract the very people who are right now searching for what you have to offer.

The wide variety of ways and search terms people use to find the products and services you offer can be extraordinarily large.  We have yet to see a client tap out the topics and sources of content that can be produced to better the lives of their prospects.  Keep in mind, we’re never talking about creating content just for the sake of content.  We’re talking about creating content (articles, blog posts, presentations, webinars, white papers, guides, videos, demonstrations, etc.) that your audience will find useful, entertaining, informative, or otherwise valuable.

If your content sucks, you can pretty much guarantee you’ve just wasted your valuable time.  But if your content is well-thought out and produced with your customers’ needs, wants, and desires in mind — and if it covers a variety of topics — you’ll find yourself continually attracting a stream of interested prospects to your website.

Need help with your content production?  Let’s talk!

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HubSpot was recently honored as the recipient of the Sales & Marketing 2.0 Award for Best Alignment of Sales & Marketing.  The marketing software provider is known for popularizing inbound marketing and has played an important role in our forming Spark’s online marketing services.

HubSpot is a great example of a company that has aligned sales and marketing teams so that they work in tandem to generate and convert prospects to leads and leads to sales.  They use a so called, Marketing and Sales SLA (service level agreement) to align the two teams. As explained by HubSpot, “The Marketing SLA defines the expectations that Sales has for Marketing with regard to lead quantity and lead quality, and the Sales SLA defines the expectations that Marketing has for Sales about how deeply and frequently Sales will pursue each qualified lead.”

Our marketing tip of the day is to watch HubSpot’s on-demand webinar, “How to Improve Your Sales & Marketing Alignment.”  This webinar will show you:

• How to increase number of high-quality leads to satisfy sales
• How to nurture leads that are not yet sales-ready
• How to successfully measure marketing campaigns
• How to grow a culture of shared inbound marketing goals

View the webinar here.

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Finding out what leaders in your industry are blogging about keeps you abreast of trends and competition. To find appropriate blogs, go to Google blog search and enter topics or keywords that are relevant to your business.  Also check the blog search engine, Technorati.

Once you find a blog that interests you, subscribe to the RSS feed, and read new blog posts as they arise. When you see an article that is relevant to your business, leave a well-thought-out comment. Why? First, the author of the blog will notice and appreciate your comment and may visit your web site (or blog) to find out more about you. This may also lead to the author mentioning you in a future blog with a link to your site. Secondly, commenting on a blog gives you new relevant traffic. A reader may appreciate your comment , and  click on your website to learn more.

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Everyone is talking about Social Media Optimization — making your website or blog more “socially friendly.” A socially friendly website instills trust in potential customers and can help overcome barriers to purchasing your product or service. Social media can be used to facilitate customer reviews and feedback, and can let browsers and buyers share their feedback, interests, and “likes” with their friends.

The website for Levi’s jeans includes a Facebook “like” button next to each product. In this way, shoppers can immediately identify the most popular items and shoppers can share their favorite items with their Facebook friends.

Consider adding a Facebook “like button” or a “Tweet this” button to your website.

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Long experience has taught us that there are three key ingredients to successful SEO (search engine optimization).  In case you didn’t know, SEO is the process of getting your website or web page to rank high in the search engines for selected keywords.  The three basic ingredients of effective SEO are:

1.       Your Website structure: The way your website is built affects the ability of search engines to add your content to their indexes.  It has to do with html and CSS code, URLs, link quality, internal navigation and the use of images, among other things.

2.       Keyword-focused content: The most important content on your site is text-based and it needs to be written around keyword phrases that most perfectly describe your service or product.  There are a number of places in a website where keyword content is helpful in SEO.

3.       Inbound links: Links to your website from other external websites will help build authority (and higher rankings) for your site in the search engines.  Building and attracting these links is essential to your SEO success.

Today we encourage you to check the health of your SEO basics.  How?  There are numerous tools online that help you assess the status of your site as it relates to each of these three basics.  Our favorites are HubSpot’s Website Grader, SEO Moz, and Google Webmaster Tools.

If you need help, give us a ring at (800) 474-1573 or request a meeting. You can also request a free website audit here.

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