Sending Vouchers In Emails: A Concise Guide

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What could be a better reason to open an email than to receive a gift voucher? In fact, most brands prefer sending a voucher as a promised gift in exchange for subscribing to their email list. They fall into the category of promotional messages, and much to your surprise, receiving promotional offers isn’t frowned upon by people. They, in fact, expect brands to reach out with promotional emails. But, sending vouchers requires paying attention to various aspects, both technical and marketing related. Read this concise guide ahead from professional email developers to see how you can send vouchers in emails. 

How Vouchers Help In Email Marketing 

When you promise a prospective customer to sign up for your newsletter, offering them a gift for doing so is a time-tested strategy to increase opt-ins. Applying this strategy for welcome emails improves your open rates. This, in turn, improves your sender reputation. RetailMeNot finds that a staggering 96% of Americans use coupons, while SpendMeNot says that over 60% of customers are fond of receiving digital coupons. Juniper Research expects a whopping USD 90 billion worth redemptions through digital coupons in 2022. 

Combining them with email marketing’s ROI of $51 for every dollar invested, you can give a boost to your inbound strategy as well as sales. An Inmar survey finds that 83% report coupons drive the changes in purchase behavior. I hope these figures are convincing enough to vamp up sending vouchers or start doing so if you weren’t sending them in the first place. Let us now have a look at how you can send vouchers in emails:

Types Of Email Vouchers That You Can Send

In this section, we will discuss various types of vouchers that can be used in your email marketing strategy:

• Discount codes: Giving out vouchers that allow your customers to buy a product for an amount less than the listed price is a great way of driving sales and encouraging people to shop from you for the first time. 
• Capped discounts: Capped or ladder discount vouchers allow you to target customers that didn’t go inactive on your web store purposefully. They also encourage shoppers to spend more money, thus increasing your revenue. 
• Freebies: Who doesn’t like freebies? Offering free products as a part of customer loyalty vouchers is one of the strongest motivators for people to continue purchasing from your brand. 
• BOGO: Buy one get one free voucher has become a synonym for a discount coupon, and it is a great way of clearing extra stock, selling with product bundling, and making the customer feel rewarded.
• Free shipping: As the e-commerce industry continues to grow, shipping charges are increasing day by day. You can offer free shipping vouchers as dealmakers provided that you have enough margin remaining. 

Where To Use Vouchers In Your Email Marketing Strategy

In this section, I am penning down the top destinations for using vouchers in emails. Have a closer look here:

• Onboarding Emails For New Shoppers: As we discussed earlier, the number one spot for using vouchers in email marketing strategy is onboarding emails for new customers. It is a win-win situation for both parties. 
• Abandoned Cart Emails: Shopping cart abandonment is the biggest problem for online retailers. Using vouchers in abandoned cart emails is any industry-wide practice for minimizing the potential losses incurred due to it.
• Up-Selling And Cross-Selling Emails: These are two activities where discount vouchers work the best. Giving your existing customers a strong reason to try out your other products is a dependable strategy for increasing their lifetime value.
• Promotional Messages: Promotional emails go well with all sales strategies and help various business efforts like seasonal sales, introducing new products, and announcing events.
• Referral Programs: Referral programs and vouchers go hands in hands due to many reasons. Firstly word of mouth works great, and perhaps you need to motivate people financially to improve the propagation speed. It also helps keep track of referrals digitally.

Things To Keep In Mind While Sending Vouchers In Emails

Like all strategies, you need to know the ins and outs for using discount coupons, and here are my two cents:

• Give Top Priority To Personalization: Personalization is an important element of sending vouchers, and you need to address the recipient with their first name and offer discounts relevant to their spending habits.  
• Keep The Offers Time-Bound: This is an unwritten rule because it drives sales on FOMO while saving you from customers lending with discount requests with vouchers dating from the last year. 
• Mention All Terms And Conditions Clearly: It may not sound interesting, but being straight forward with all the terms and conditions sets the record straight for good.
• Keep The Voucher Accessible, Preferably In The First Fold: While designing custom email templates, the message is broken down into folds depending on their position on the screen when the recipient accesses them. Mention all details of the voucher straight ahead and include the process of redemption properly. 

Over To You

I have covered most of the important aspects of sending watches in emails within this concise guide. You can easily leverage the tracking and analytics tools provided by your ESP or leverage third-party apps through API integration. I hope you find this actionable guide useful for sending vouchers to your subscribers in the future and make the most out of it. 

Guest Author: Kevin George

Kevin is Head of Marketing at Email Uplers, one of the fastest-growing email marketing agencies, which specializes in crafting professional email templates, PSD to HTML email conversion and free HTML email templates in addition to providing email automation, campaign management, and data integration & migration services. He loves gadgets, bikes, jazz and eats and breathes email marketing. He enjoys sharing his insights and thoughts on email marketing best practices on his blog.