Coupons can lower the price of products and are a common consumer business promotion tool. Coupons can be printed on the insert of a magazine, enclosed in a newspaper, attached to the product, or attached to the packaging of a product, or placed in a store for people to request, and sometimes even sent on the street to distribute.
Coupons (or promotional coupons) are divided into two types in terms of pricing. 1. Discount coupons generally mean that when consumption (or purchase) occurs, the consumer (or purchaser) can use the discount coupon to calculate the discount at a rate specified by the discount coupon based on the list price published by the merchant. For example, a 2% discount is a 20% discount based on the list price. 2. Vouchers generally refer to promotional coupons with a certain face value. For example, a one hundred yuan voucher refers to the use of the voucher for consumption (or purchase), which can be used to deduct 100 yuan in cash.
Regardless of whether it is electronic or not, the purpose of coupons is to help merchants promote furniture sale to consumers (or buyers) in the form of profit within a short period. Therefore, merchants must pay attention to the following two points when issuing coupons.
1. The margin of profit must be moderate, to achieve the purpose of increasing sales. In other words, the profit margin needs to be large enough to attract consumers, but it must not be excessively discounted to damage the overall sales profit. If the newly-increased profits (that is, the profits from the new customers) brought by the profit-making are less than the profits lost from the old customers, the overall sales profit will decline. This kind of profit-making is not called profit-making for the merchants but called meat-cutting. The so-called concession should be a concession on the unit quantity of goods or services, but the total sales profit should not decrease at least.
2. The profit must be short-term. Merchants must let consumers have clear expectations about this. Otherwise, if consumers regard preferential sales as price reduction, the profit will change from short-term to permanent profit. In the future, it will be impossible for merchants to raise the price back to the original level because consumers have already taken the price down as they should. In this way, the business of the merchant becomes unsalable. In this way, normal sales cannot be maintained, and permanent sales must be completed through sales promotion.
Various disadvantages
edithigh cost
Gradually, merchants began to publish coupons through traditional print media such as newspapers and magazines, and to use this to expand their brand attention and popularity, just like extending the distribution to the area covered by the newspaper, which is more effective. However, this is not an effect-based billing model, ranging from a few thousand to as much as tens of thousands of huge advertising costs, in addition to hypermarket electrical furniture stores, etc., most merchants tried to retreat after a few attempts, rarely interested.
Similarly, from the perspective of user experience, after all, people who carry magazines or newspapers for consumption are a minority. Most people cut the coupons they see when they are in the media, and then present them for consumption. But the problem is that the time interval between the collection and consumption of coupons after cutting off will often cause more or fewer users to lose them.
a fly in the ointment
The prosperity of the Internet at the end of the last century has made coupon download channels easy. Businesses are gradually getting used to publishing coupons through their own portals or granting third-party life information websites to publish in forms other than printing and SMS downloading. By browsing the Internet, users can immediately obtain the coupon through these two methods and display it for consumption when offline consumption.
Of course, the shortcoming is that users cannot sit in the office or at home at any time to browse the coupons, nor can they use a computer with Internet access to download the coupons before spending when going out to spend.
One coupon is not easy
The birth of the terminal should refer more to the concept of subway vending machines. Place a terminal in subways, shopping malls and other places with people flow, and print coupons through the terminal in the form of an NFC induction card. You can often see the grandeur of white-collar students queuing up to print coupons during meal times. So the problems also followed one after another. First of all, the terminal's settlement and maintenance required certain costs, and these costs would be allocated to the merchants; secondly, the time cost of queuing to print coupons would also be spread to the users, greatly reducing customer satisfaction. Over time, the interests of businesses will also be affected indirectly. [1]
