December 04, 2007

Discount retail vouchers

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.

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.

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.

The lesson here is: if you plan on using a money-off voucher to drive traffic to your site, make sure its email friendly.

Posted by Robin Goad at 02:55 PM
Posted to Christmas | Email | Retail | Search | Shopping and Classifieds

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