Deal with a slow season with coupons!

Following the busy tax return season, beauty supplies face a slow Summer season. Meanwhile, the increas-ing number of competing stores suffocate your busi-ness. What would be a great marketing tool that could lubricate your cash flow while not costing an arm and a leg for marketing?.

Part 1

Consumers love coupons

Here comes a 15% off coupon for any purchase of or over $15. This is a coupon issued by a restaurant/bakery operating in a rural area of Ohio. As noted, many retailers have adopted the use of coupons. Even a local restaurant in a rural area faces the need to issue a coupon nowadays. That is the current status of competition among brick-and-mortar retail stores, which can be felt like surviving a hurricane. Before issuing a coupon, you must make sure that benefits outweigh the cost. Let’s first examine how consumers appreciate discounts and promotions like coupons.

About 15% of consumer satisfaction comes from promotions such as coupons, making it a significant factor. For this analysis, a chain beauty supply store that is well known for promotions is chosen. Depending on the performance of a store manager, some stores received good reviews while others did not. Coupon is an implementation of discount promotion, and considering most beauty supply chains’ promotions rely on conditional discounts, you can say consumer appreciation of promotions roughly equals consumer ap-preciation of coupons. A review was considered to be about promotion only when the re-view contains words like sale and deal, but this chain beauty supply showed a high satisfaction regarding pricing. This implies that pro-motions including discounts have affected the consumer satisfaction although the words were not used in the review. As such, you can say the consumer satisfaction over promotions takes up almost 40% of the total satisfaction.

Coupons bring customers close to the store
In relation to other factors, beauty supply customers appreciated promotions such as coupons more than product information conveyed by staff while less than product range. A factor that works against the consumer appreciation of promotion in BNB’s analysis is that not many beauty supplies surveyed ran promotions. All things put together, you can conclude consumers consider pro-motions such as coupons a big part of retail business. Let’s ponder a little more on this. If you assume that there are 20 beauty sup-ply stores within a five-mile radius from your store, you can attract more customers by issuing coupons. When other stores do not issue coupons, this outcome is almost guaranteed. Coupons short-ens the distance between a retail store and a customer. There is a simple reason why beauty suppliers do not issue coupons despite its effectiveness. They involve complicated process and cost money. A simple and cost-effective method will be explained.

Coupon Usage Rates of American Consumers
Let’s find out when ordinary American consumers make a purchase decision and what kind of coupons they use. The survey was performed on consumers who used at least one coupon in a year. While the use of paper coupons vary insignifi-cantly by years, smartphone coupons are on a quick rise in usage rate. Smartphone coupons include digital coupons and redemption of coupons through apps. The same survey reports that 48% of consumer make a purchase decision at home regarding what and where to purchase hygiene and personal care products. When you compare those items with goods sold at beauty supply products, you can say African Americans are more likely to make a purchase at a store that issues coupons. The beauty supply customer satisfaction factor analysis showed the pro-motion was an important factor, and thus coupons have a great utility.

Part 2

The Answer Is Smartphone Coupon.

Most consumers check smartphone coupons
Smartphone adds a variety of functionality to texting. This can be utilized as a great marketing tool. For example, most people do not read promotional emails while they read text messages, making texts more efficient communication tools for marketing.

Smartphone texts last to lengthen the store’s relationship with customers
Other than simply sending coupons, you can use text messages for various marketing purposes. You can send out video clips, images, and receipts to customers. To stay close to your customer, you want to send video or image links that are related to merchandise and sales. Consumers tend to like sharing their personal experience with products in addition to buying products at a retail store. Simply put, they want to purchase goods where they are recognized and appreciated. This aspect of consumer satisfaction can be done via smartphone texts.

Smartphone coupons cost little and are easy
When it comes to beauty supply retail stores with relatively small size, digital coupons are a perfect marketing tool because they do not re-quire a lot of financial and human resources. Nevertheless, you need to take baby steps before sending out your coupons via smartphone. Let’s examine those baby steps.

First, you need to collect customers’ phone numbers
To issue a digital coupon, you must know the customer’s cell phone number. Next, you need to set a plan including promotional details, coupon designs, and contracting text marketing service providers. You can also expect people sharing digital coupons with friends and family, and thus you would attract not only regular visits but also new customers.

You can organize customer database using Excel
Primarily, you only need customer name, phone number, and email address for issuing digital coupons. Any retailer already using a POS system can utilize the customer database functionality in their POS system for which you simply ask customers their personal information during checkout and enter the information. Because most customers are reluctant to surrender their personal information, you may want to provide promotional goods around $1 value as a reward. Here, asking detail information makes the cus-tomer even more reluctant to release any information, so you want to keep it simple. The following is a sample customer information form.