How to Use Digital Coupons to Drive Sales & Foot Traffic to Hospitality Venues (with Pirate Life & Tourism South Australia)

Digital coupons are an essential tool for businesses to interact and engage their community, build and reward customer loyalty, and drive sales and foot traffic to venues. The latter is an important issue for Tourism departments around Australia (and the world!) who have faced nearly two years of interrupted domestic and international tourism. Partnering with Komo, Pirate Life Brewing and Tourism South Australia (“Tourism SA”) ran a digital coupon campaign to drive sales and foot traffic to South Australian hospitality venues. Their experience highlights the efficacy of digital coupons as a marketing tool.  

In this blog, we will examine Pirate Life and Tourism South Australia’s digital coupon campaign to demonstrate how digital coupons can achieve marketing success for businesses.

1. Digital Coupons Attract Customers with Tailored Prizes, Rewards, and Incentives

Prizes, rewards, and incentives are a go-to method for businesses to expand their customer base – after all, everybody loves freebies!  According to research by The Decision Lab, people overvalue free products.  Consumers view products with a zero price point as an increase in the value of a product, not only a price drop.  Free products make people happier, and that happiness supports their decision-making process.  These results solidify what many of us intuitively know: consumers derive more utility value from products with a price cut (a.k.a people love a deal).  

Rewards, offers, and prizes are one side of the equation; tailoring them to fit the preferences of your customers is another. A thorough understanding of who your customers are and what they value about your marketing offerings is essential to any digital coupon campaign. 

The power of personalisation has always run deep in any successful marketing strategy and brands that don’t personalise pay a heavy price.  Accenture Interactive’s Personalization Pulse Check 2018 reported that 91% of consumers are more likely to shop with brands that provide personalised offers and recommendations. Similarly, a study by SmarterHQ on millennial shopping behaviour indicates that 70% of shoppers get frustrated with generalised, batch-and-blast offers and communications and prefer personalised communications. 

Following the seismic shifts brought about by the Covid-19 pandemic,  “personalisation and empathy [are] now the essential building blocks of a sustainable customer relationship.” and a whopping “69% of shoppers reported that coupons affected their buying decisions in Q4 2020.”

Recognising the value of personalised freebies to attract and delight customers, Pirate Life and Tourism SA collaborated to create relevant and tailored digital coupons for their community to promote Pirate Life’s newest craft beer and local South Australian hospitality venues.

To reach these goals, Pirate Life created an Engagement Hub that allowed customers to claim a digital coupon for a free pint of South Coast Pale Ale beer at a location that was convenient to them. Komo’s technology allowed Pirate Life and Tourism SA to personalise the digital coupon to the user’s geolocation, providing timely and relevant value. 

By getting customers in the door with personalised digital coupons, Pirate Life established itself in the minds of its customers through brand awareness and Tourism SA supported local venues that had been impacted by the Covid-19 pandemic and Australian lockdowns. 

Read More: Do Digital Coupons Work (2021)?

2. First-Party Data Collection and Lead Generation with Digital Coupons.

In 2020-2021, digital coupon redemption overtook print.  This is an important shift with regards to first-party data collection and lead generation.  If you have used a digital coupon before, then you have likely seen how they incorporate forms and opt-ins to generate first-party data and leads.  With the rise of digital coupons and the increasing value placed on personalised marketing, digital coupons are prime to become the new normal for marketers to build customer databases and increase customer loyalty. 

Data collection with digital coupons is important on two fronts.  One, it gives marketers the ability to understand their customers' demographics and directly address their needs with tailored marketing. Second, the cookiepocalypse is upon us and marketers can no longer reliably turn to third-party data for their marketing strategies. This shift will negatively impact marketers’ ability to understand their customers and personalise offers.  

New laws and regulations designed to protect the online user aren’t the only obstacles to marketing success. A recent McKinsey study highlighted that customers are increasingly wary of sharing personal information online, but “they are far more likely to share personal data that [is] a necessary part of their interaction with organisations.” Thus, businesses must take steps to design attractive digital coupon campaigns that feel ‘necessary’ or evoke customer happiness.  

Interestingly the same McKinsey study noted that concerns around data privacy and protection can also serve as a business advantage. Giving customers strong assurances that their data will not be misused can encourage customers to provide that data. This provides an opportunity for marketers to play with incorporating messaging or processes that assure customers of data privacy.  

Pirate Life’s campaign kept it simple and non-invasive by collecting minimal information.  Their data collection fields only asked for customers’ first name and phone number, and provided a check box to agree to the terms and conditions.  This aligned with the digital coupon campaign goal to build first-party data assets and ensure data privacy of customers.   

3. Digital Coupons Allow Pirate Life and Tourism SA to Track, Measure and Improve.

Marketers with data-related capabilities are invaluable assets to businesses. Digital tools that provide a method to measure success are a gamechanger for marketers and assist all stakeholders in making informed marketing and business decisions. 

In addition to collecting demographic information and leads, marketers can also gain insights on purchase behaviour and track ROI with digital coupon campaigns. A well-designed digital coupon campaign that tracks the right metrics allows businesses to understand important aspects of the customer journey and consumer purchase behaviour. This data aids in continuously improving marketing strategies and discovering further drivers for sales and foot traffic.   

Digital coupon campaigns also allow for testing different product marketing strategies and acquiring data and insights in real-time. For example, digital coupons can be used in an A/B test to ascertain which products are more attractive than others, and/or offer digital coupons with different discount rates on products to gauge price elasticity.    

As a comprehensive SaaS platform, Komo’s Engagement Hub displays dashboards to track redemptions and other important campaign information.  This gives Pirate Life and Tourism SA real-time analytics to track redemptions, understand where their customers are, and evaluate their success in achieving campaign objectives.