Insights / Multichannel / Pureplay
The E-Coupon Phenomenon Continues: Australian Coupon Sites
- 29th September
- Chris Garner 4
E-coupons are here to stay. Australian online shoppers are becoming increasingly e-coupon savvy, as two of the nation’s most popular coupon sites are taking advantage of this exploding phenomenon.
Just as e-coupons are taking hold as new e-commece phenomenon, Australians’ love affair with coupons is starting to heat up, with mainstream media outlets such as the Daily Telegraph and A Current Affair recently running stories about them.
The right partnership with a coupon site can drive high volumes of visitors and sales for online retailers by taking advantage of the large number of people who are already members of various coupon sites. Smart shoppers are seeking out coupons before committing to a purchase, and research firm Frost & Sullivan is predicting that online spending in Australia will total $12 billion this year.
When done well, a coupon strategy also has the power to upsell customers to a more expensive item, help to preserve retailer margins, and increase Average Transaction Value.
So where are Australians finding the best online coupons, and how can you get in on the action?
Here, we review two of the biggest online social communities that are delivering large volumes of potential customers to brands offering coupons. We also show a case study about how an online marketing agency can help with a well planned coupon strategy, as we did with Dell.
Two engaging sites, OzBargain and RetailMeNot, enable their communities to share, rate and promote the best online coupons.
As well as Dell, other brands that have utilised online coupon strategies include Domino’s Pizza, Emirates Airline, Avis Car Rental, Vodafone and Weight Watchers.
OzBargain
OzBargain aggregates coupons offered by everyone from Coles Supermarkets to Dell Computers. The essence of this site is captured in the words of its owner, Scott Yang. “OzBargain is a bargain sharing community,” he says. “People find great deals or new coupon codes either online or from bricks & mortar stores, and they share what they have found on the website so others can benefit. The community is mostly Australia, and is technical-biased – i.e. people who usually perform research online on products and shops before purchasing, and are comfortable to shop online, if that gives them a good price.”
The site is rapidly gaining momentum, as statistics from June 2010 (the end of financial year providing a rich source of sales and coupons) show:
- 6,000,000+ page impressions
- 2,100,000+ visits
- 500,000+ visitors
- about three pages/visit
- more than six minutes of time on site
Yang believes that the benefits to the whole community are broad. OzBargain tells members when and where the sales are on. It is an extensive repository of online coupons, and more great deals are posted every day. “Many merchants and retailers are happy to offer exclusive specials for the OzBargain users,” explains Yang. “We are a community of shoppers, where people want to help each other find good deals and provide constructive reviews on products and retailers.” The site contains a forum and a wiki to help members conduct their research.
The site also has wide appeal to Australian retailers says Yang. ”We help Australian online retailers to tap into the biggest online shopping community. A good deal that gets lots of votes can send down a few thousand unique visitors to your website within hours. Our members are also providing helpful feedback and suggestions to merchants to help them improve in future.”
OzBargain is community moderated, which means everyone wields voting power. The more votes, the higher the post or comment will raise in the listing.
A recent campaign undertaken for Dell on OzBargain, demonstrates the volume of sales that can be generated within the shopper community. The Dell Wasabi was reduced in price to shift excess stock, so dgm seeded a coupon to communities such as OzBargain, knowing that the message would go viral and deliver large volumes of sales within a very short period of time.
Within hours of the $29 offer appearing on OzBargain, Dell experienced sales numbers (below) directly attributable to that community.
As further evidence of the growing popularity of online coupons, the OzBargain site has doubled in the past year, in both the number of users and page impressions. “This steep increase could be the natural growth of OzBargain,” says Yang, “or it could mean that Australian shoppers have smartened up to using the internet more for research purposes.”
Either way, according to Frost & Sullivan, online shopping in Australia continues to lag behind the US and UK, with an estimated 40 percent of e-tail spend going to overseas sites.
RetailMeNot
RetailMeNot is one of the globe’s leading coupon sites, with more than 15 million unique monthly visits, including 120,000+ unique visits in Australia. There are more than 500,000 offers on this site at any one time, from 70,000 retail stores; numbers that are doubling year-on-year both around the world and in Australia.
With the average user spending $150 per transaction and, according to RetailMeNot studies, saving an average of $29, it’s not hard to see why this site has garnered such a vibrant community.
RetailMeNot offers a deep directory of shopping coupons that are predominantly user submitted. The community continually tells the site’s coupon engine which are the best coupons by way of casting votes. As of June 2010, RetailMeNot was pushing through US$36 million in sales a month, to third party sites. Growth for the site has been driven by word of mouth, which is a testament to its usability.
While traditionally Australian shoppers have been accustomed to negotiating in store to get deals of this type, sites like RetailMeNot are shifting behaviour to online coupons.
Bevan Clarke, co-founder of RetailMeNot, points out that the future of online coupons is very bright indeed, harnessing many major retail brands in Australia that have recently launched or soon due to – the likes of Bing Lee, Big W and Dick Smith will all have a major part to play this Christmas.
In subsequent articles on this topic we will cover off:
- Building a comprehensive online coupon strategy for the Australian market place
- Coupon2.0 the future of coupon redemption strategies
Related Articles
One Comment
Leave a Reply
We have never tried coupons before and we did some testing with a coupon with a site to assist in market research(savingonretail.com) and even know the site wasnt due to launch until mid March they actually had 187 off our coupons downloaded in 3 days and 20% of them were redeemed on our site.
It generated just on 4k of sales som looking forward to there being more options available.
Any exposure for online sales is good as no matter how much we spend on google and advertising to get market share is hard.