We manage an affiliate marketing campaign for a UK jewellery store who’s sales were flagging due to a lack of marketing activity

We did a full website assesment, checked that the commission was competitive, that the creative was of a high standard, and introduced the usual incentives for affiliates.

Things started to pick up, and the affiliate sign-up was high which meant a gradual increase in sales.

My colleague suggested to the merchant that they may also wish to issue a voucher code to affiliates as a means of furthering marketing reach and to incentivize customers to purchase from the store.

The merchants reaction was something like ‘if a customer is going to buy from us, they will do so without a voucher code‘ and ‘this just means customers will see the promo code section on the checkout, search for a code which will cost us commission!’. Both of these are common reactions.

However, they were good enough to trust us and try a 2-month code with an expiry date as a test.

It didn’t take long for the voucher code sites to take the code, and immediately the sales through the network started increasing. At first, the merchant assumed that this was because these new sales were simply customers who would have purchased anyway using a code and therefore sales that would have occured anyway were suddenly coming through the network.

However, after the first month, we asked them to check their logs, and they came back and reported a 34% sale increase (over and above the expected sales for that month) for all sales, and it seemed that many of these ‘voucher code sales’ were indeed additional sales. With a little further investigation, we could see that new users were actually coming from the listings on voucher code sites as if it were a new marketing channel in itself.

So, it shows that the popularity of voucher codes is spreading and that many online buyers are checking the code sites FIRST to see what dicounts are available and then shopping BASED ON THE EXISTENCE OF DISCOUNTS.

It all follows the principle of allowing customers the opportunity and belief that they are getting a bargain!