January Is Coupon Month

If you are like me somewhere in your home you have a drawer full of coupons that magically landed in your mailbox. For me personally given the fast food junkies who live in my house that drawer is full of restaurant coupons such as Mcdonald’s, Harvey’s, Montana’s Cookhouse, East Side Marios, Boston Pizza you get the idea. And yes that is really what is in that drawer as I just double checked. If you pay attention like I do you will notice that your mailbox is jammed in January with these types of deals. This is not a coincidence as these chains have focused marketing departments that rely heavily on analytics while being very ROI driven. In reality the most important stat for coupon advertisers is redemption and simply put this is higher in January than any other month hence the repeated annual cycle. So why the heavy response in January? It really is a common sense approach. The month of December is our biggest retail month of the year in terms of spending for obvious reasons. Many Canadians put themselves into debt and spend the coming months catching up. So naturally this results in consumers looking for deals, and more specifically coupons over the coming months. This hits its height in January as the credit card statements are actually coming in, the weather is gloomy, people are more depressed and everyone is looking for a bargain. In some cases this may be a psychological effect but either way it drives major spending through coupons.
There are numerous ways to reach this audience such as your local Metroland newspaper, one of our direct to door products such as FlyerMail, a direct mail campaign (see Metroland’s Simpofly for an easy way to do this) or an online campaign through a deal site such as WagJag or Save.ca.
I am going to provide one example of one of my direct to door advertisers A&W who often has a campaign in January. If I take just one market of 54,000 doors in FlyerMail which is a $2500 total investment they will get upwards of 2000 coupons back which is a 3.7 per cent redemption rate. You don’t need to be a mathematician to figure out when the offers are structured properly this has a very high ROI.
So the time is now to start planning for January, get your offers in place and come up with a strategy so that you can tap into an audience that is out there looking for deals and ready to spend but you need to have the correct bait to reel them in.
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