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Hitwise Intelligence - Robin Goad - UK

Analyst Weblog

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Discount retail vouchers

December 04, 2007

Last week Gap hit the headlines with its 30% off voucher, which some wag photoshopped and forwarded on as a 60% off voucher. Whatever the problems caused by the fake voucher, it seems likely that they were more than offset by the free publicity. Money-off vouchers have become an increasingly popular form of viral marketing for brands of all shapes and sizes. Last week UK Internet searches for ‘vouchers’ reached a 2 year high, and have already overtaken last year’s Christmas peak.

UK Internet searches for vouchers.png

In order to try and determine how successful these vouchers are, I took five brands that have recently released them, and charted visits to their sites over last few weeks.

UK Internet traffic to voucher sites.png

The increase in traffic to Gap was moderate, but it doesn’t have a transactional site in the UK. Hamley’s received a boost, but as you would expect it has been on an upward trend over the last few weeks anyway. The two sites that experienced a notable increase last week were Threshers and Selfridges, and the chart below may explain why. It illustrates the amount of upstream traffic that the sites received from web-based email services and, as you can see, both Threshers and Selfridges clearly benefited from the viral effect of people mailing the voucher to their friends.

How important is email when launching a money off voucher.png