Affiliate Marketing Monday – To Coupon or Not To Coupon

With Easter approaching in just less than a week, there are a lot of sales and promotions going on for most merchants.  This has brought me to discuss the idea of to coupon or not to coupon? Let’s discuss the pros and cons for both merchants and affiliates.

Affiliates

To Coupon – Most affiliates will tell you that an exclusive coupon is one of the easiest ways to increase promotion on their site.  If you are an affiliate, why wouldn’t you want a coupon?  Online shoppers are always looking for coupons and ways to purchase things at a cheaper price.  If you have this coupon, then you are more likely to receive a commission from that click.

Not to Coupon – I do believe there are more reasons to coupon than to not coupon, but the biggest reason not to is that people won’t click, they will just copy and paste the coupon.  Before I understood affiliate marketing, I didn’t want to click an extra button, I wanted a promotion code and that was it.  Sure, there are ways to get passed this, such as forcing a click in order to reveal the coupon code, but not all sites are built that way.

Merchants

To Coupon – Before you make this decision, you must run some numbers and look at your profit margins.  After taking into affect the commission and fees paid to the network, can you still afford to take an additional 10% off or $5.00 off from a coupon?  If the answer is yes, then go right ahead and create a coupon.  There are multiple strategies in creating coupons as well.  You can create one generic one for a holiday and give it out to all affiliates.  You can also make the affiliates work for the coupon by making them reach a benchmark before they receive their own coupon code.  A coupon can easily help you win a sale over a competitor with a similar matched price.

Not to Coupon – Very simple, if you can’t afford it, then don’t do it.  That would be the number one reason not to coupon.  Some items are sold with such small margin, that there is just no more room for discounts.  If you are a company that already has the lowest prices on everything, then you may not even need coupons to draw the sales from your affiliates.  You must educate your affiliates on this however.  If your prices are lower than competitors without a coupon, explain this to your publishers because they may not realize it, and only promote the ones with a coupon.  Affiliates want to make money, bottom line.

To sum it up in my opinion, if you are an affiliate, ask for an exclusive coupon code.  If you are a merchant, create special coupon codes at a minimum during the holidays.  If your margins allow it, create a code for some of your larger affiliates, and allow a chance for some of the smaller ones to gain their own coupon code.