December 03, 2008 | Wednesday
Retail voucher searches on the up
By Mark Johnson - Snr. Campaign Manager in Marketing |News |Online Sales
This past week we’ve had a flurry of internal emails with various coupons and links for online and offline stores vouchers such as http://www.myvouchercodes.co.uk/home and http://www.vouchercodes.com.
I know people are probably fed up with the constant talk of the “R” word, but it will definitely be playing a major role in how people spend over this festive period. I mentioned in my last post that 86% of shoppers will research Christmas shopping through the internet before buying in-store and that this year more than any other, people will be looking for the cheapest deal.
We only have to look at Google Trends to see the growth in searches for these voucher codes and the amount of websites advertising on the keywords. I wonder how many of the companies know their vouchers are on these sites, and how much traffic they drive as a result? Who could forget the Threshers’ discount voucher in 2006.
A cock up or viral marketing triumph? I wonder what returns Threshers could have got had they planned for such a stampede? (one so big it brought their website down for several days, meaning many voucher holders were unable to locate their nearest store and sales assistants overworked by the increase in demand)…
With customers looking for a bargain this Christmas I believe online vouchers and voucher codes could be very important to the marketing mix. Used smartly, they could drive more consumers to your site and the increase in goods sold would offset the discount given. It will be interesting to see if any companies work with the websites that show their codes to help promote them, or whether they’d rather not so many people knew about them. This year is definitely the year where some will get great returns whilst others see their margins shrink.
Comments
#1
Hi, we’ve seen a lot of abuse from voucher codes sites this year too. A lot of them have been misleading customers with ‘click-to-reveal’ offers that when clicked don’t show a voucher but open up the merchants site and stuff a cookie (Try this link http://www.myvouchercodes.co.uk/discounts/imusician.co.uk. What vouchers? Our site doesn’t even have any vouchers, this is blatant cookie stuffing). A lot of networks and voucher codes sites (including those above.) have been getting fat from this to the point that new legislation in the New Year (http://www.dgm-uk.com/index.php/iab-affiliate-council-code-of-best-practice-for-affiliates-advertising-voucher-codes) should mean that they start to clean up their act and we actually have voucher code sites with valid voucher codes instead of sites adding nothing to the shoppers experience and also preventing us from working with affiliates properly.