Protect Yourself When Offering Coupons

We all made it through Black Friday, Small Business Saturday, No-name Sunday and Cyber Monday. Whew!

This is a time lots of merchants offer coupons. Here are some basic tips to make sure people don’t take advantage of you.

Always have an expiration date not more than 30 days out. This will give people a sense of urgency to come in and use the coupon sooner rather than later.

Put a code on the coupon. If you are using more than one method to distribute your coupons, then you will want to track which method works best.

Not valid with any other offer and one coupon per customer. If you offer more than one coupon or offer, then you might not want people to stack so that they do not pay anything. The same goes for ‘one coupon per customer’; you don’t want people using two or more coupons for the same item.

Make an offer that people will really want to use. Put yourself in their shoes. If you received this coupon in the mail or through the Internet, would it excite you to do business with them? If you answer no, then come up with a better offer.

One last point. When I first became a manager of a retail store, the franchisee during a managers’ meeting (the franchisee had 7 or 8 locations) was talking about the use of coupons and said if you live by coupons, you die by coupons. He then told us how to put your competition out of business by using coupons.

Till Next Week –