New Jersey Brewery - Coupon Offer

Turning Digital Ads into Real Revenue: A Case Study on Coupon Downloads

What’s up! This is Chris with Ger Hoptimized, and I'm excited to break down a case study about a coupon download campaign we ran for one of our clients. This is an excellent example of how you can use digital ads to drive email opt-ins, grow your owned channels (especially email), and ultimately, drive on-site revenue. What’s more, this is all trackable, so you can measure the rate of return and the revenue you generate with a system like this. Let's dive in!

The Campaign Setup: Buy One, Get One Free Pint

To help you envision the campaign, here’s a little background. We wanted to push a "buy one, get one free" pint coupon. We created a landing page on the client's website (in this case, Wix, but this could be done on Squarespace or any other website platform). On this landing page, we included a contact form that said, "Enter your name and email, and we’ll email you a coupon that you can use in the next 30 days to get a buy one, get one free pint."

So, that was the setup. Now, how did we market this? We did a few things. We had the landing page with the free opt-in, and we ran a Meta Ads campaign. We also supported the campaign with email marketing to push it out to the existing email list. However, I'm going to focus mainly on the Meta Ads and how we tracked performance to look at the return on spend and return on marketing.

The Results: Tracking Conversions and Redemption

Overall, we spent about $150 on Meta Ads. What did that get us? We got 120 coupons downloaded, and we tracked that with a conversion on the contact form. This is an important piece and a cornerstone of our marketing philosophy: we want to track conversions like this so that we can measure the effectiveness of our ads.

We saw that there were 120 downloads of the coupon. Of those 120, 20 were redeemed. The client tracked redemption by creating a custom punch code on their point of sale (POS) system. Whenever someone showed up and presented the coupon, they entered the special punch code. This allowed us to see that 20 coupons were redeemed, which gave us a 20% redemption rate.

Analyzing the Data: Return on Ad Spend

Is a 20% redemption rate good or bad? Well, it's useful as a comparative metric for other coupons you run. It helps you see which coupons people actually care about and what gets them to submit their contact information. However, the real metric we care about here is the revenue from orders with the coupon.

We asked the client to run a report on all the tickets that included this coupon to look at the revenue from those tickets. In this case, it was about $800. We then compared that $800 to our $150 marketing spend. $800 divided by $150 gives us a return on ad spend (ROAS) of 5.33.

What does that mean? It means that for every dollar we spent on marketing, we got $5.33 back. So, it's about a 5 to 1 return on ad spend. Keep in mind that this isn't a profitability number. There are other costs associated with this, such as the cost of the beer, staff, and other operational expenses. However, this metric is crucial for understanding the effectiveness of the ads.

If we had spent $150 and only gotten $50 back, our ROAS would be less than 1, meaning it cost us more than we earned. That would be important to know, and it would tell us that the campaign didn't work for us. Tracking this data, even when it's negative, is essential.

Scaling Marketing Programs: Building on Success

The report from the POS was essential to understanding the big picture: how do you use this information, and how do you scale a marketing program like this? This is why we say that what we do is "marketing that brews results." We build marketing systems that leverage advertising (like social media ads and Google Ads) and owned channels (like email, text messages, and app push notifications).

We use these channels to drive traffic to a product page or a landing page. In this case, it was a landing page with a coupon download. But you could use this same system for beer pre-sales, merchandise sales, or event registrations. The key is that there's a measurable unit, something we can track on the landing page or product page that's related to a business outcome.

In this coupon example, the business outcome was owned channel growth (opt-ins) and driving on-site revenue. The strategy was designed to drive people in using the coupon. It’s important to note that any sale or opt-in does multiple things: it grows your owned channel list, which strengthens your overall funnel.

We believe that owned channels are the most valuable channels you have. Anytime you get a chance to grow that list, you should. In this case, the opt-in led to on-site revenue because people had to come in to use the coupon.

Putting It All Together: Marketing That Brews Results

This is how we build our marketing strategy. This is the foundation. This is the same kind of funnel we look at when designing client strategies. We can help you plan promos, run your owned channels (email, text), and run ads to grow on-site and e-commerce revenue and build those owned channels.

You might be surprised at how affordable this can be. If this sounds interesting and you think your business could benefit, please reach out to us. We’d love to talk to you and see if this is something that can work for you. Even if not, you’ll learn something. Thanks for checking this out!