Are you looking for an innovative way to reward your existing Amazon customers and incentivize new customers? With Amazon Seller Central Coupons, you can accomplish both of these goals and simultaneously satisfy other important objectives: drive more traffic to your listings, differentiate your brand from the competition, and secure more sales. In this post, we’ll explain:
What are Amazon Coupons?
Amazon Coupons are digital coupons that offer a discount on product listings, which are only redeemable on Amazon.com. Amazon customers can “clip” or redeem a coupon by checking the box next to the orange coupon badge on a listing—look for it under the price of the product. This will instantly save the coupon for that particular product, which will then be automatically applied at checkout.
What are the Benefits of Using Amazon Coupons?
In a competitive marketplace like Amazon, it can be difficult to keep old customers and attract new ones. Customers have the ability to compare prices from a variety of sellers, all in one convenient location. Establishing clear goals and an effective strategy around proposed coupons for your products will help maximize the benefits. Those benefits include:
- Differentiate Yourself From Competitors: With a vast amount of options, Amazon customers need a reason to pick you over other sellers. By pricing lower than competitors—pricing competitively—your products will stand out.
- Improve Brand Awareness: As we will discuss in the next section, your product listing will appear on the Amazon Coupon page, which is a highly trafficked page. Discoverability is the key to brand awareness.
- Reward Existing Customers & Secure More Sales: By offering a discount to your existing customers, you are solidifying their business in the future by rewarding them in the present. This will create a repeat customer who is loyal to your brand. When a customer already trusts your brand and service, a coupon might entice them to try a new flavor, scent, or quantity of these familiar product offerings.
- Incentivize New Customers: The goal of any discount is to attract new customers and encourage them to try something new. Most customers really need that incentive to step out of their normal buying habits. Offering a coupon on Amazon is one of the easiest ways to turn an indecisive shopper into a newly converted customer.
- Drive Traffic to Your Listings: Amazon customers need something to draw their attention to your product detail page. The clearly displayed green coupon badge on the search results page will help you easily stand out.
- Increase Sales: Using coupons will help boost your product listing click-thru rate, increase your conversion rate, and increase your product ranking over time. Ultimately, this will result in more sales—a sort of halo effect.
How Do Customers Find Coupon Offers?
4 Steps for Creating Amazon Coupons on Seller Central
Under the Advertising tab on Seller Central, you will find Amazon Coupons. Before clicking on “Create a New Coupon,” make sure you have all the necessary information. You’ll need to know which products to discount, the discount amount, the audience you’d like to target (if any), and your budget. These are the basic things you’ll need to get started.
Step 1: Search & Add Products to Coupon
In the first step, you will search for a particular product or group of products by entering each ASIN or SKU—you can add up to 50 ASINs on a single coupon. After inserting the correct products, click “Add Coupon” and your product will appear under “Added Coupon.” Once this is complete, click “Continue to Next Step.”
PRO TIP: If selecting a group of products to include on a single coupon, it’s easiest to select like-products so the pricing is similar when applying the discount.
Step 2: Select Your Budget & Discount for Coupons
Arguably, the most important step, it’s time to decide your budget and discount amount. Select “Money Off” or “Percentage Off” and enter the discount amount you want applied to your coupon. The required discount has to be between 5% and 80% of your lowest price for the product in the last 30 days. Next, decide how much you want your customers using the coupon. You can limit the redemption amount to one per customer or you can allow them to redeem the same coupon many times.
PRO TIP: We recommend selecting “Money Off” as your preferred discount type. It’s the easiest way for the customer to calculate their discount amount—percentages can be confusing.
Selecting the right budget for your coupons can be a complicated process. Not to worry, we will discuss this more later and even provide you a formula to follow. Each coupon has a minimum budget requirement of $100. This is because your budget will be a shared cost among the following:
- USD equivalent of the discount you are offering
- Amazon redemption fees ($0.60 for each redemption)
To avoid any overages, Amazon will automatically deactivate coupons once they have reached 80% of the total budget. The reason they stop short of the overall budget is to account for any clipped-but-unredeemed coupons as well as the fees and discount amount. Amazon specifically states, “Coupon budgets are for planning purposes only, and budget overshooting should be expected.” However, exceeding your coupon’s budget rarely happens when you do your homework. Read on!
Step 3: Schedule & Target Amazon Coupons
This next section requires you to provide a coupon title—this is the text customers will see when they preview your coupon. For the most effective titles, provide a general definition of your product. Remember to follow Amazon’s title guidelines or you will have to recreate your coupon and submit again. For more uniformity, Amazon auto-populates the first 3 words of your coupon title to include your discount amount, “Save $5 on…”
The best part about using coupons is the targeting feature which allows you to select a specific audience when applicable to your strategy. These include: “All Customers,” “Amazon Prime Members,” “Amazon Student Members,” and “Amazon Family Members.” This gives you the ability to hone in on an audience that is particularly relevant to your product. Not to mention, on Amazon Prime Day, you can target only those customers with a Prime account to maximize sales—for other Prime Day tips, check out our blog, “10 Tips & Tricks to Prepare for Amazon Prime Day.”
Once you’ve selected your audience, you will need to schedule your coupon. You can select any duration between 1 and 90 days. If you need to run your coupon for longer than 90 days, you will need to resubmit the coupon once it has expired. The good news is this gives you a chance to evaluate your ROI before determining to resubmit.
Step 4: Review and Submit Amazon Coupons
This step is the easiest. Review the information that you input into the system; double-check for accuracy and ensure you’re following the strategy you conjured. Once it’s exactly as you want it, click “Submit Coupon.” Then, you will receive a message from Amazon informing you that your coupon was received and will be reviewed. Note that you can edit your coupon up to 6 hours before it’s scheduled start date, which can be done on your Coupon Dashboard. After this period of time, you can only make the following changes:
- Extend the coupon duration if less than 90 days
- Increase the budget
What is a Coupon Dashboard?
Your Coupon Dashboard is where all your coupon metrics live. It allows you to review each coupon’s performance. This includes if your coupon is active, expired, or currently running as well as how many coupons have been redeemed and, of course, your sales. The dashboard is handy because it saves your coupon’s historical data. If you need to look at last year’s Prime Day coupon results, you can search it in your archived coupon data. Also, at the click of a button, you can re-run any coupons that have been successful. It’s also a great way to track your budget and spend to ensure you haven’t gone over.
Setting Up an Efficient Budget for Coupons
According to Amazon, an efficient budget should cover the cost of the customer demand for your product. It’s important to calculate how many units on average the product is selling per day and then use this formula to calculate a minimum budget:
(# of days x # of average daily units) x (discount amount + redemption fee)
Amazon’s example says that if a product is averaging 20 units per day without a coupon, and you want to run a $5 off discount for 10 days, your formula should look like this:
(10 days x 20 average daily units) x (5.60 discount + fee) = $1,120 budget
PRO TIP: Avoid having a lower budget when creating coupons with a large discount amount. Your coupon won’t last very long, which means very few customers will see it.
This Amazon formula can help you set up an effective budget and strategically use coupons to drive more traffic to your listing, improve brand awareness, and secure more sales.
Conclusion
Coupons are a great way to stand out from the competition and grab customers’ attention when they are looking at millions of products on the Amazon platform. The simple act of adding a coupon to your ASIN incentivizes new customers to try your products for the first time and also rewards your existing customers to help retain them for the future. If you establish clear goals for your coupons, stick to your budget, and use an effective strategy, you will maximize all the benefits coupons have to offer while avoiding any pitfalls.
Need help with your Amazon Coupon strategy?
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