Top tips: The Search for Incremental Sales – VoucherCode Sites

Online shoppers can be a fickle bunch, with so many alternative retailers only a click away, so generating customer loyalty is a key challenge for advertisers. In the first of two articles looking at incremental sales, Owen Hewitson, Client Strategist at Affiliate Window & buy.at, focuses on the relationship between VoucherCode Sites and advertisers.


Voucher coding, whether by an online retailer themselves or through a voucher code site, is now so commonplace that advertisers need only ask themselves how best to utilise it to their advantage. Whether voucher coding has caused or paralleled the rise of today’s smart online shopper, it is undeniable that consumers are demanding enough to shop around in pursuit of the best offer, replacing traditional loyalties to retailers with their need to feel they have got a deal.
Voucher code sites have grown to cater for this demand, capturing their audience across multiple channels – email, social, mobile and offline – with the result that the largest are a constantly recurring feature of users’ journeys prior to purchase.
From the standpoint of an advertiser seeking to assess how incremental sales from these sites are, this dominance might engender suspicion. How can they ensure such sites are generating sales they would not have made anyway? If their size makes them necessary to work with, how can their audience be leveraged to their advantage? This article looks at ways of assessing the ‘incrementality’ of sales from voucher code sites.
The first thing for advertisers to recognise is that the best voucher code sites are more than simply code directores. Their visitors are engaged through multiple channels and see them as much as repositories of deals as for codes. One way in which some advertisers have sought to ensure incrementality is by not awarding commission to voucher code sites where a voucher was not used. But this would be to take the conventional affiliate category of ‘voucher code sites’ too literally: not everyone who shops via a voucher code site uses a code. Instead, advertisers scrutinising incrementality can ask the following question: what has the site done to produce a sale that we could not have done ourselves or that another site could not have done instead? For instance, retailers issuing their own codes or offering them to non-‘voucher code’ sites do so at the expense of the reach certain voucher code sites can provide.
Incrementality can be assessed not just on whether a voucher code site can introduce a customer, but whether they can take one away from a competitor. Working tactically with these sites puts brands in front of consumers deliberating over where to shop, giving them the opportunity to take away their reason to switch (something especially useful during the competitive Christmas season, for instance).
Juxtaposition of their own brand with a competitor’s is something many retailers fear about voucher code sites. Some code sites help to overcome this by building a page with zero leakage to competitors and referring paid search traffic on brand + voucher code keywords to it. To assess incrementality, retailers can ask themselves: who would be better at converting traffic on these keywords – our site or a voucher code affiliate?
The types of voucher codes offered are immensely important in helping to assess incrementality and there are a number of tactics advertisers may wish to try to ensure they do not unnecessarily sacrifice their bottom line or their brand.
Offering a blanket discounts on all products is untargeted and so not optimised to attract the highest value customers. These also instill the impression that discounts are widespread, thus potentially cheapening brand perception. Instead, offering free delivery codes is a good way to reach the wide audiences voucher code sites command without devaluing the product itself. Whilst a free product code will do the same, there is plenty of evidence for the effectiveness of free delivery codes.
Comscore reports that 61% of consumers are “at least somewhat likely” to cancel their purchase if free delivery is unavailable, and orders which include free delivery record basket values averaging 30% higher than those without. Retailers nevertheless wanting to offer blanket discounts can consider offering ‘quick expire’ codes to ensure incrementality. Not only will they know that the resulting sales are from the most engaged users (useful to remarket to!) but they are also highly unlikely to have bought anyway.
Other techniques to drive incremental sales include issuing ‘stretch & save’ codes (for example, spend £50 and get 5% off) to boost AOVs and EPCs above the average; and targeting codes to voucher code site users that would represent the best value customers (for example, new rather than existing customers). However, it is far from the case that an existing customer is not incremental. Just because a customer has shopped before does not mean they will return, so retailers may need to use another of these tactics to engage ‘floating’ consumers before a competitor does.
Once having tested these techniques to ascertain incrementality, retailers can offer exclusive codes to the best performing affiliates in return for their best coverage. Onsite logic like that used by Red Letter Days can either display or hide the voucher code box depending on the referring URL.
Finally, it is worth remembering that voucher code sites’ audiences can be a testing ground for offers later intended for the broader customer base. As many have been quick off the mark with mobile, a location-based code offered to an affiliate that reaches its members via a mobile app is perhaps an interesting place to start.
by Owen Hewitson
Client Strategist
Affiliate Window & buy.at
www.affiliatewindow.com