Use E-coupons to Increase Your Sales

Coupons are a great way to reward your customers, invite new customers, and increase your sales. Consider how implementing coupons in your business can help your company grow.

E-coupons are easy to use in e-commerce sites. You will need a shopping cart system that allows you to implement a coupon code.

Even if you don’t have an e-commerce site, you can offer coupons that your customers redeem in your store. Make sure that the same person is not coming in again and again.

There are several different kinds of coupons you can use:

• First-Time Customers: Entice new customers with coupons. You can offer a certain percentage off of their first purchase or offer free shipping for new accounts. The sky is the limit on possibilities you could do for your coupon.
• Returning customers: Reward your returning customers with an e-coupon for their next purchase. You can give them their coupon after they finished a purchase or through e-mail.
• Loyal customers: Reward the customers who loyally buy from you again and again. If you keep good accounts on purchases, send out an e-coupon to those that have made a certain amount of purchases from you.
• General incentives: If your sales are going a little slow, offer coupons to everyone to comes to the store. You can do this with a mass e-mail or offer a coupon code on the home page. This is a great way to boost your sales and satisfy your customers.

Brad Harmon is the President at a leading financing company, First Star Capital (www.firststarcapital.com). Brad is a frequent contributor to online publications and newsletters, and is the author of this blog on commercial financing topics.

Improve the Customer Experience on Your E-commerce Site

You can lose hundreds, if not thousands of dollars by making a poorly constructed website. Customers will become frustrated and want to take their business elsewhere. To provide the best website experience for your customer, try to implement some of these tips.

• Have contact information easy to navigate to.
• Have thought through navigation. If you have sub navigations, make it obvious and easy.
• Have a search box. This will help customers get to what they want quickly. Most website visitors want to get to what they are looking for in three click or less. Having a searching function can get the visitor to their product in two clicks.
• Having good search results. It is very disappointing to be shopping for a green phone, search, and get a list of text links. If you can, have images come up in the search results.
• Good content that is easy to find.
• Offer a breadcrumb trail. This is a trail at the top of the page that lets the visitor know exactly where they are in relation to the structure of the site. For example, the breadcrumb trail could be "Apparel > Watches > Men's > Sport."
• Have pleasing colors (please, no neon green against neon pink!)
• Strong checkout that spells out where the customer is and what they need to do. Amazon.com spent thousands of hours and millions of dollars to develop their 1-Click shopping method. You can never go too far to have a strong shopping cart system.

Brad Harmon is the President at a leading financing company, First Star Capital (www.firststarcapital.com). Brad is a frequent contributor to online publications and newsletters, and is the author of this blog on commercial financing topics.