Today, whether you’re running a print ad or advertising through an online platform — you’re going to want to design the best dry cleaning coupons possible. Coupons are one of the easiest promotions to keep track of because customers must turn them in to take advantage of your special.
Unlike a storewide BOGO or promotional menu pricing, customers will have to secure and redeem your ad and can’t just stumble into storewide savings. Consequently, it’s much easier to calculate your return on investment (ROI), especially if you’re carefully keeping track of how many coupons are redeemed.
Why Use Coupons?
As mentioned, by monitoring how many coupons your customers actually return against how many you sent out, you can easily measure your campaign’s success. Calculating your ROI is just going one step further and requires you to simply weigh how much revenue the coupons triggered against how much you spent on printing and distributing the coupons themselves.
In these ways, coupons can help business owners test different markets and figure out where their advertisements are really working. By running the same ad in two different areas and watching how many come back from each place, you can quickly get a sense of where you should plan to advertise again in the future.
Moreover, if you test different styles of coupons across different zip codes or coupons with different phrases or promotions, you can get an even better idea of what your customers are looking for.
Keep an Eye on Your Competition
It’s important to see what kinds of ads your competitors are running so you can learn how to stand out. Try to differentiate your design from theirs. This can be as simple as choosing a different color palette and text, or it can mean catering towards another level of “simplicity” or “aesthetic styling” than your competitors.
The most important thing to look out for is what kinds of promotions they’re running. In order to compete, you’ll want to initially run competitive — if not more generous — offers. Then, once you get a better idea of what kind of advertising works in your area, you’ll be able to run fantastic ads with smaller promotions because your customers will already be familiar with your brand.
Branding Your Ads
When you’re choosing the “design elements” you want to run your ad with, you’re selecting how you want to brand your business. If you’ve already established a strong color palette with your logo, or have an atmosphere you’re trying to create in your store, you’ll want to push these ideas into your advertising.
Remember that your coupon should not only be advertising a special strong enough to create new customers, but it should also promote your business well enough to build lasting connections. If customers identify with your brand, they’ll be more likely to return and watch out for your ads in the future.
Moreover, as you begin to build “brand familiarity” within your community, you’ll be able to rely on word of mouth advertising and create referral or loyalty programs within your store.
What to Include in Your Ad
To compete, your coupon has to stand out. Small businesses often want to highlight the promotion they are running in a big, flashy way to get their customers excited — especially when competing with other print advertisements in the same forum.
Of course, the best way to do this will be with a strong promotion. Don’t be afraid to run an offer that may be difficult to maintain because you can always adapt in the future. Do, however, be wary of advertising anything below cost. Even if you can afford to run the special for a short time, you ultimately want to use your promotion to push your customers to purchase other services or return in the future.
A great way to build a strong offer without giving too much away is to use a “Call to Action” (CTA). A CTA is a phrase that invites your customers to “act now” and presents your ad with greater immediacy. This phrasing can be as simple as “Enjoy 15% Off” to “Limited Quantities Available.” The latter will incentivize the customer’s immediate action and may be enough to get them into your business ASAP.
These calls to action are especially important in today’s world, where customers are extremely over-advertised to. Experts expect that consumers have to view an ad at least twice before even registering its message, so it’s important to run your campaign through a platform that can ensure great repetition.
Where to Run Your Ad
As mentioned, the two factors that will help you test your advertisement’s success are repetition and “targeting.” While “targeting” was not specifically defined before, it’s the concept of running your ad in different areas to figure out which community responds best to your brand. If you already have a sense of where your customers eat, work, and play, this will be much easier.
If you don’t, it’s always best to start advertising locally to try to reach the customers who are closest to you already. There is no better motivator than proximity, and finding a way to advertise to a specific community is easy with grocery store advertising.
Through programs like coupon-receipt advertising, you can advertise to thousands of shoppers each week and run your coupons on the back of grocery store receipts. This means every single shopper leaves with your coupon each time they visit the store.
These supermarket advertisements ensure huge repetition, with many shoppers visiting their local stores two to three times a week. Plus, most grocery stores pull their customers in from a three-mile radius, which further ensures hyper-local targeting.
This program is just one medium of IndoorMedia’s Unconventional Print Advertising, and there are several other grocery store advertising campaigns to choose from. These take care of all the day-to-day stress of actually running your campaign and are sure to generate great results while you focus on running your business.
By Talitha Turkin
