Many people in the industry believe that the consumers want internet coupons and they trust the brands which offer these coupons. With this scenario in the industry, its not a great surprise that the term “internet coupon” has became a really big buzzword at least in the retail and manufacturing industry.
Internet coupons which are also called online coupons are distributed over the internet by the retailers or the manufactures to their customers. These online coupons can be exchanged at retail stores for rebate or some other type of financial discounts by the consumers. As these coupons have the ability to increase good number of new customers to the stores, they are used as a big sales promotion tactic by the companies. Some companies are even using these online coupons as the first option for their sales promotion.
In a recent study conducted by an independent agency in the United States of America market, it got revealed that more than 21% of the bigger companies are using these online coupons as the promotional element for their new products. And more than 60% of the bigger brand companies believe that the consumers treat them as big brands only if they provide some great internet coupons at regular intervals of time. These facts and figures clearly show the increasing importance of the internet coupons at least in the American market. These trends are really good for the consumers also as they get good number of financial rebates from the manufacturers and the retailers.
The future is also looking bright for these internet coupons. As the penetration of the internet is increasing day by day at a very rapid pace; it is obvious that one can reach great number of targeted audience just through the internet at a very minimum cost. Not only this, even the cost factor involved in distributing these internet coupons is just negligible when compared to the conventional means of distributing coupons through mails. Hence the manufacturers and retailers will definitely look with more interest into this concept.
But there are some limitations to this concept also. One can not be sure about the conversion rate of these internet coupons. Even though people are coming up with some cutting edge technologies to get good reporting systems they are not that successful until now. And also, consumers have to bear the cost of printing these internet coupons. So, it is possible that some consumers may not show good amount of interest. Finally, it is very hard to different the legitimate and illegitimate coupons at the retail outlets.
Hence, we can say that the internet coupons can only be a good complementary thing for the traditional ones. But they can not for sure replace the traditional ones at least in the near future.
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