Non-Traditional Amazon Promotions: How Coupons Can Help You Drive Consumer Value
In this guest post, discover how you can use promotional coupons on Seller Central to increase engagement and the overall customer experience.By Mike BeggJune 12, 2019
Stay on top of the latest e-commerce and marketplace trends.
Amazon sellers have been using Seller Central promotions for quite some time now. Creating single-use discount codes has been a staple of product launches on the Amazon platform. However, we believe there is another promotion that can provide even more value to you and your customers — Amazon coupons.
Coupons are available on both the Seller Central and Vendor Central platforms. Seller Central coupons are much easier to implement and track the performance. In this post, we are going to focus on using coupons on the Seller Central platform. Third-party sellers on Seller Central make up the largest share of Amazon sales and vendors are switching to or starting to use the Seller Central platform more frequently.
We are going to examine how coupons are set up on Seller Central, and will then talk about goal setting and when you should consider implementing coupons for your listings. Finally, we will look at why they are valuable for both you as the seller and your customers.
How Do Seller Central Coupons Work?
Coupons on Seller Central are easy to set up and use. You start by selecting which ASIN(s) or SKU(s) you want to run the coupons on. Using the parent ASIN of a variation will add all of the child variations to the coupon. There can only be one coupon running at a time on a product. Submitting an ASIN that currently has a coupon will give you an error and you will need to remove that ASIN.
Next, you will select the type of discount you want, either money off or a percentage amount. You will also choose a budget. The budget will count towards the redemption fees per coupon and the discount redeemed, so we recommend setting it high. Choose whether you want to limit the coupon to one per customer or not and then move on to the next step.
You will need to come up with a short coupon title that will show on search results pages and the coupons page. A Seller Central coupon campaign can run for up to 90 days. We usually select the longest time frame possible to ensure we are utilizing our full budget.
Finally, you can choose to target specific customer groups. You have the option to select from Prime members, students or family members. This can be helpful if your product is relevant to a specific audience or you want to offer a unique benefit to attract customers to your brand.
Setting Goals for Coupon Campaigns on Seller Central
We recommend defining specific goals when you are creating Seller Central coupons. It is easy to get carried away and provide broad coupons covering all of your products. However, doing that can just lead to giving away profits unnecessarily.
Coupons are great for improving specific metrics on Seller Central. You should focus on the metrics to benchmark and track your coupon campaign’s performance. Two of the metrics that can be easily improved with coupons are your unit session percentage, or conversion rate, and advertising click-through-rate (CTR).
Listings that have high traffic numbers with a low unit session percentage are great candidates for coupons. The average conversion rate on Amazon is about 8%. You should consider getting your listing conversion rates to at least that point with coupons.
Likewise, partnering coupons with advertising campaigns can lead to hugely improved performance numbers. A coupon can make an ad more attractive to customers leading to improved click-through-rates, conversions, and ACoS.
About the Author
Mike Begg is the co-founder of AMZ Advisers. Mike and his team have been able to achieve incredible growth for their clients on Amazon by optimizing and managing their accounts, creating in-depth content marketing strategies, and running effective off-platform marketing campaigns.
How Coupons Provide Value to You and the Consumer
One of the most obvious value-adds that coupons can bring to the table is increased sales. Converting a large percentage of your listing traffic is key to running a successful coupon campaign. Psychologically, coupons work to convince customers to try a product. The benefit for you as the seller is the financial impact.
Giving a discount as small as 5% can lead to a drastic increase in conversions. Imagine you have a $10 product, 100 page views, and a 5% conversion rate, with $50 in sales a month. If a 5% coupon can help you get to an 8% conversion rate, you just added $30 in sales. What was your total cost to get those three additional sales? If you answered $1.50, you are correct. Giving up $1.50 to get $30 in sales is a pretty good trade.
Seller Central coupons can also give your products more visibility and enable you to stand out on product searches. Coupons are featured on a specific section of the Today’s Deals page on Amazon. Your listing will also show up with a small badge on search results pages showing your coupon and discount. This can help you stand out from a competitor’s listing on the same page.
Finally, Seller Central coupons can lead to increased brand exposure. They can convince a customer to give your brand a try over a competitor. This can organically lead to more customers if you have a great product through referrals and word of mouth. It is not a metric that is easily trackable, but you can monitor whether a coupon is helping you bring in new customers if you utilize Amazon Advertising.
The Amazon Advertising platform has much more in-depth metrics than Campaign Manager in Seller Central. One of the great metrics they track is new-to-brand (NTB), or the percentage of first-time customers your ads converted. Benchmarking the NTB number before and after implementing coupons can give you some tangible metrics on how coupons increase your brand exposure.
Use Seller Central Coupons to Instantly Add Value
Coupons can be a boon to your Amazon sales and cost you virtually nothing. Seller Central has created an easy process to add coupons to your listings. Defining your goals and the outcomes you want for your Amazon coupons will help you successfully implement them.
Seller Central coupons can quickly improve your conversion and click-through rates. They can also give your product a psychological edge in the mind of consumers. Increased brand exposure can also lead to potential repeat customers in the future. Using coupons can be a simple, yet effective promotional tactic to quickly increase your sales and demonstrate your value proposition to the typical Amazon consumer.
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