Google Insights for search term "Coupons"

Check out the 2008 Holiday season spike in the search term “coupons”.  Wow — you know times are tough when everyone is scrambling for online coupons.

Online coupons are a great opportuntity to build a direct relationship with your consumers and potentail consumer by offering online coupons.

Coupons can be offered on your web site, through the large coupon sites like Fat Wallet, Coupons.com, or Savings.com and through social networks like Bloggers and Facebook.

New technologies that control the distribution of online coupons have increased retailers acceptance of the coupons.  Check with your largest customers to ensure they will accept the coupons.  And work with one of the large online coupon technology providers.  The technology providers handle everything and have bits in place to stop fraud.  Expect to pay a set up fee which will include a number of coupons printed.  Then you will pay per coupon printed after meeting the number included in the set up fee — so you pay for each time a consumer prints the coupon.  You will still need to work with a redemtion house.

Online coupons are becoming very popular and it’s a great way to add an element of interaction, reward, and measurement to your online campaigns.  Consumers are looking for them (check your Web Stats and see how many people get to your site looking for “coupons”) and they can be used to attract new consumers. When doing a Blogger out reach campaign it’s a must to incent the Bloggers to give coupons to their readers.

A “Websert” (as called by DM News and others) is a third party offer added to a transactional email.  For example, the image here is of a websert added to my hosting bill.  Every month my web hosting company sends me a bill and add in a third party offer.  I’ve bought this kind of placement in the past and found that if the product / service being offered has some synergies to the email the recipient is receiving that conversions can be surprising.

In my experience, these webserts cost similar to sends emails to third party lists.  They greatly depend on the quality of the list.  Expect to pay between $10 and $100 CPM but could go up to $300+ cpm for certain lists.