Types of Coupon codes

What would my customers like to see?

[jdubo79]

I am in the process of setting up the ability for my customers to use coupon codes on my website. Besides the general $ and % off coupon codes, are there any other creative types of standard promotions that people use and would be willing to share?

I run a subscrition based service and some promotions I have thought of are:

Free month
% off
$ off
spend x amount of dollars and get x amount free.

Are there any types of coupons you can think of that you would be willing to share?

Much thanks in advance

[jdubo79]

Am I doing something wrong when I post or is it just the types of questions I ask? I have posted a few questions, and I rarely get people to respond.

[walkman]

on edit: too stupid to notice that there's no shipping involved ;)

Free Shipping is best IMO, people see the price and don't have to wonder about shipping.

Other than that, $ might better, cause it's easier to understand. The % has been diluted by claims of "up to 50% off" etc.

[edited by: walkman at 9:15 pm (utc) on April 5, 2005]

[Faith]

If your site is subscription based, is there any complementary products that a sponsor can provide (e.g. a free product which you could use as a premium or incentive?). If so, see if you can get them to provide so many per month, in exchange for a nicely positioned link or even a story or article about their product/offering.

In my experience customers like freebies, especially when they are useful, well targetted and of limited supply. So, offer them for a limited time only and then change the offer regularly.

PS I love this type of thread - if others have anything to share we could all learn some useful stuff!

[CanadianChris]

Something we've done is add free items to the site. If a customer spends $30, then a free item worth about $10 is automatically added to their order. Works very well.

It took alot of coding to develop fully though because we had alot of situations that would disqualify an order (i.e. if Item A is in the cart, but not Item B, then add Item C at $0.00). Lots of work to setup, but it worked very well :)

[stiksandstones]

I have free shipping all the time on my site...just added coupon codes for a percentage off, some are 10, 20, 30 % off. I post the code with an odd keyword MARCHBINGO or whatever so its kinda like a cult following of people that know the codes, it works well for me.

[abertone]

Our most popular coupons are:

$ off with minumum purchase and $ off a particular line of products.

I have tried using coupons for 1 product at a time that I wanted to clear out of inventory and it isn't as popular, so I use close outs instead.

For holidays, we have done find the "easter egg" or for our employees birthdays (there aren't a lot of us) we hide birthday cake or candle graphics with coupon codes on product pages. These seem to work well and customers will browse longer looking for them and will dig deeper in the site.

-ABertone