Extending the Life of Single-Use Coupons

Since the release of our single-use coupons feature at the end of February, coupon series expiration has been a popular question. If you haven’t seen answers to some of the blog comments, or if you haven’t yet visited our help page to learn more about coupon series expiration, this post may help answer some of your questions about how to extend the life of a single-use coupon series past six months, and why limited-time coupons can be better for your store’s sales and revenue.

Changing the expiration date

If you’re using single-use coupons, you’ve likely noticed that when you create a coupon series, you must set an expiration date up to a maximum of six months into the future. So if you created a single-use coupon series today (April 3), you could set an expiration date for any date up until October 2 of this year. Thinking ahead, some of you have asked the very valid question, "What if I want the coupons to be good for a longer amount of time?"

As you approach a coupon series expiration date, you can edit the series to extend its lifespan. Each time you edit a coupon series, you can extend the expiration date up to six months from that day (the edit date), to a maximum of one year (365 days) from the date the series was created. You can edit this date as many times as you wish until you reach that one-year maximum. All that’s a bit of a mouthful, so here’s an example:

• April 3, 2009 — I create a single-use coupon series, good until October 2, 2009.
• On August 15, 2009, I decide that I want the coupon instances in this series to be valid for a longer amount of time. I locate the coupon series in Coupon Manager, and edit its expiration date. Since I’m editing the coupon series on August 15, I can extend the expiration date to any future date up until February 14, 2010, which is six months away.
• On February 1, 2010, I once again decide that I want this coupon series to stick around for a couple more months. When I edit the coupon series this time, I can extend its expiration date until April 2, 2010, which is one year from the date the series was created.

One thing to keep in mind is that all coupon instances in a series will inherit the extended expiration date. For step-by-step information about editing a coupon series expiration date, please visit our help page.

Why should I create limited time offers, anyway?

In a word: incentive. When you create a coupon offer, the intent is to drive business. In cases where a coupon offer is extended as a customer service tool or apology, the main intent is to keep a customer’s business rather than have them turn to a competitor. Again, you’d like them to return to your store and to purchase your products. Creating a limited-time offer gives customers more motivation to visit your store within a given timeframe, to remember that they’ve received the coupon offer rather than setting it aside, and ultimately, to redeem the coupon with a purchase. In the current economy, incentive to buy in the immediate future is simply good for business.

If you haven’t yet used the single-use coupons feature, we encourage you to start. Remember, creating different coupon offers as individual series can help you experiment with what works best for enticing customers to buy from your store. The coupon series conversion rate, along with information about associated orders and revenue, can all be found in your Coupon Manager.

If you’re using single-use coupons and have a success story you’d like to share, please leave a comment or send us an email. Your store may be included in a future blog post.

Jennifer Farwell
Yahoo! Small Business

Free OneTwoPunch live webinar

Join Eric Yonge of EYStudios and Scott Smigler of Exclusive Concepts for their next OneTwoPunch live webinar, on Wednesday, March 18, at 2 p.m. EDT.

During this free webinar:

• Learn about branding and search marketing
• Get a round-up of this month’s important Yahoo! Merchant Solutions and online retail developments
• Hear from special guest Don Cole of Your Store Wizards, who will talk about the Your Store Wizards product feed solution
• Take part in a live Q&A session

This webinar is intended for Yahoo! Store merchants of all sizes and experience levels.

Register for the webinar

Friday Tips and Tricks: Adding Video, and Building Links

While catching up on some of the week’s reading and watching, I came across two videos that I thought would be great to share with all of you. At a few minutes each, they’re well worth the viewing time.

The first video, “Add Your YouTube Videos To Your Yahoo! Store,” comes from Shawna Fennell of 1 Choice 4 Your Store. As we’ve previously mentioned on the blog, product videos can help your site stand out, and are a great way to showcase and demonstrate the products your store carries. As Shawna explains in her video tutorial, posting videos to your store can be as simple as uploading a video to YouTube, customizing display settings, and copying and pasting an already-generated embedded video link.

The second video belongs to SEOmoz’s Whiteboard Friday series. This week, Rand Fishkin looks at how to get awesome links. Learn what makes links “awesome,” and how to get these high-quality links. We’ve had a few blog posts from Rob Snell covering similar link-building topics, so if you’ve missed them, be sure to check out his articles on link-building and keyword ranking, looking for links in all the right places, and link-building strategies.

Jennifer Farwell
Yahoo! Small Business

Coupon Manager Gets an Upgrade and Introduces Single-Use Coupons

According to a January 2009 comScore survey, over 50% of consumers are using coupons more often as a way to cut back on their shopping expenses. Given how important coupons are for driving sales during these tough economic times, we are excited to announce that we’ve just launched improvements to coupon functionality.

First off, you’ll notice the Coupon Manager looks different. We’ve added sortable columns, pagination, filters, and have also included four more fields in the main view which will make it easier to manage and monitor your coupon offers. We’ve also added the ability to download order details for any coupon, regardless of the number of orders it has generated. And, you can also download coupon details for use with external applications.

Single-use coupons

We know that merchants need to create compelling offers that can’t be abused or overly distributed and also need to create coupons for unique one-off situations. To address this, we’ve introduced single-use coupons. This new coupon type allows you to create coupons that can each be redeemed one time only.

Single-use coupons are best suited for rewarding loyal customers with exclusive offers, enticing specific customer segments, and improving customer service by extending special offers on a per-customer basis. The coupons in each series get reported on in aggregate, so you can see how your campaigns perform, just like you would with a standard (non-single-use) coupon.

Let’s say you want to launch an email campaign to a set of 500 customers who have bought big-ticket items from you in the past, but haven’t bought from you recently. You want to create a generous offer because these customers need motivation for shopping with you again. You decide to create a 25% off coupon with no minimum order amount. Without single-use coupons, you’d risk this offer possibly being posted to a coupon or social networking site, forwarded via email from friend to friend, or used repeatedly by the same customers. Single-use coupons allow you to create more aggressive offers for appropriate customer segments, limiting your risk by knowing that each coupon you send out can only be used once.

Similarly, you might want to offer a single-use coupon to a customer who had an issue with a previous order as a “make-good” – it might be worth it to you to give them a $10 coupon for a future order to mend the relationship, but you wouldn’t want this coupon to be floating out there for anyone to scoop up.

Product exclusions

We’ve heard from many of you about the need to not only create coupons that apply to certain products (which you could already do) but also to specifically exclude items. Now, not only can you exclude individual products, but the new structure of selecting items to include or exclude allows you to select the items within an entire category all at once.

Let’s say you sell a few video game systems and thousands of video games. You want to set up a promotion that discounts all the video games, but not the systems. With product exclusions, you can easily create a coupon that excludes just those few systems.

Greater flexibility in coupon naming

Coupon names used to have to start with a letter. No more! We’re opening this up and you can now begin codes with numbers as well. If you want to name a coupon for 20 percent off dog leashes “20offleash”, go right ahead.

Coupon search

With all these new features, we’re pretty sure you’ll want to create more coupons. In order to make it easier for you to find coupons you’ve previously created (or find a unique instance of a single-use coupon) we’ve added the ability to search for a coupon in the Coupon Manager. The new search function will allow you to search for a coupon, a coupon series, or a single instance of a single-use coupon. In the case of a single-use coupon, results will even show if it hasn’t been redeemed yet.

Coupons are an effective way to drive sales and keep your customers coming back. These new features will both help you manage your coupon campaigns and allow you to create compelling campaigns that capture the attention of your existing customers. Now, more than ever, maximizing your conversion rate and generating sales from existing customers is incredibly important.

Happy Couponing!

Laurie Briggs
Yahoo! Small Business