Using coupons can be very effective in a down economy. Remember an earlier post titled,  Coupons can be used to accelerate sales in down economy and in fact it is one of our most popular posts too.

But how often have you printed a bunch of coupons for your promotion and been left with extras when the promotion was about to start? Or worse when the promotion has ended?
Did you print too many? More likely you did not have a way to distribute the coupons for maximum effectiveness.

In today’s post I wanted to describe a few ideas around how to get your coupons to go viral.

• Display coupon offers in other Locations
  If you have multiple locations is the promotion you are running going to be for all stores, or only specific stores on certain days.
• Talk to local merchants on your street or block about promoting you
  Another way to get word of mouth marketing is to distribute coupons to other vendors. This week I was buying take out Chinese food at our local restaurant, and while I was waiting I noticed a coupon sitting on the counter for free bowling. The coupon was certainly inviting since I was just waiting around for the food order to be ready. And two I had not hear of the new bowling location in my area.
• Re-purpose the same offer on your website, or in your email newsletter
  Get the word out online or by email, with a forward to a friend option could help. Make it easy to forward the email version of the coupon to others, meaning that you may not want to personalize each coupon code for instance.
• Twitter or Facebook
  A lot of companies are encouraging sign ups by promoting incentives. For example, this offer is only available to our fans or followers.
  
• Encourage sharing to get the word out
  Bring a friend with you when you redeem this coupon and you eat free. That type of thing. Or require a certain level of participants such as a group or 3 or more.
• When giving out the coupons give out several to the same people
  Having extra coupons people will try to share the discount or offer with their friends. On several occasions this has happened to me while waiting in line and the person in front of me used up the maximum coupons they could. And gave the extras to the guy standing behind him.
• Send an SMS to mobile phones of your customers
  Perhaps this strategy is newer and not everyone is trying it yet. But hey there is opportunity there then right.

Possibly Related Posts:

• Missing Guarantees that could hurt Sales Conversions
• Defining Advertising Objectives for Small Business
• Consider Timing as part of your Marketing
• HubSpot Study: Small Businesses That Blog Get 55% More Website Visitors
• Scarcity Selling Works

Many businesses have started creating their own Facebook Fan pages to communicate with their customers and fans. However not everyone knows that you can also use your Fan page to collect valuable email addresses to contact your fans directly in their inbox. Adding a newsletter sign up form to your Facebook fan page only takes a few minutes but can be very effective in growing your email list.

If you are looking for more information on why your business needs a Facebook Page you can read our earlier post: Do you need a Facebook Fan Page for your business?

What you will need:

1) Facebook Fan Page
2) Email sign up form (Many online email marketing tools offer a built-in tool to create an HTML sign up form for your website)

How to add a Newsletter Signup form to your Facebook fan page

Step 1: Login to Facebook and go to your Fan Page
Step 2: Click on the “Ads and Pages” link in the footer toolbar of your Fan page
Step 3: Click on the “Pages” link, and then on “View Page”

Step 4: Add the “Static FBML” application to your page by click on the “Application” icon in the footer toolbar.
Then select “Browse More Applications”

Step 5: Search for “Static FBML“, and click on the icon for the application.
Looks like this:

Step 6: Click on the “Add to my Page”

Step 6: Configure your newly added application, by clicking on “Edit Page” on the left menu.

Step 7: Put your mouse cursor over the blue pencil icon, and click on “edit” under the Admin Options.

Step 8: Paste the HTML code for your sign up form. This was the second item from our what you will need checklist above.
On the Edit FBML screen paste your sign up for source code and then click “Save Changes“.

Step 9: Your Facebook Fan page should not contain a new Newsletter tab which when clicked will display your email sign up form.
If you do not see the Newsletter Signup form option click on the ‘+’ sign to see more tabs. Your page probably looks something like this:

Possibly Related Posts:

• 70% of Local Businesses Use Facebook For Marketing
• How To Get New Facebook Fans
• Using Online Video for Marketing
• eMarketer Reports on Twitter Message Content
• Customer Acquisition – Hunting or Harvesting Leads