Coupons.com Launches Social-Net Coupons with Redemption Controls

Coupons can get found on the Web in a number of ways. For example, Google lists about 86 million search results for the term, and Bing 60 million. Agency Razorfish identifies access to deals as the top reason consumers friends brands on Facebook or Twitter.

But the viral potential of social networks has always been a two-edged sword for marketers looking to build awareness or sales with online coupon offers. If a coupon doesn’t circulate, it doesn’t work; but if it rolls out far beyond expectations, it can throw promotional costs out of balance, trashing redemption budgets and eating into return on investment.

Printable and digital couponing platform Coupons.com has just introduced a feature that will allow marketers to enable coupon sharing within social networks while still controlling the total cost of those promotions.

But with the new enhancement to the Coupons.com platform, users who print out a participating coupon can click a link at the end of the print page to post news of the coupon to their Facebook wall, Twitter account or Google Buzz page. Their friends and followers in those networks can see the update, either containing a bare description of the coupon offer or with a personalized comment from the poster, and click on the link contained to print out the coupon themselves.

When downloads reach the cap set by the manufacturer or retailer, the coupons will no longer be available for printing or download. In those cases, depending on how the program has been set up, clicking on the link may present users with a chance to sign up to be notified the next time an online discount is set to launch, either by fanning the brand on Facebook or opting in to an e-mail list. That’s much less complicated than the process, standard to couponing within social networks, of managing consumers’ expectation about time and volume restrictions on coupon offers.

Coupons shared over the Coupons.com platform can be saved to users’ shopper loyalty cards or to their mobile devices, depending on how the marketers have set up their promotions. Users will have to have an account with Coupons.com to do those things and will have to link their loyalty cards to that account.

Combining coupons and social media involves balancing disparate aims, says Coupon s.com CEO Steven Boal. Marketers must keep a handle on redemption costs. But they also have to make sure the offer is something consumers will find satisfying and worth sharing with their friends.

”Balancing those two things is a tricky intersection,” Boal says.

While plenty of brands have offered coupons via their Facebook page or other social media channel, most have also relied on multitudes of coupon bloggers and their avid readers to build distribution. The Coupons.com platform will let marketers take advantage of the power of recommendation to spread their offers.

The social-media enhancement went live last week on Coupons.com’s Bricks lead-generation product and had more than 100 marketers involved at the launch, Boal says. The company expects to roll the feature out to its Digital FSI network of Web sites, including its home page and thousands of affiliated Web pages, as early as next week.

Boal points to research that suggests 30% of Facebook’s almost 500 million users remain constantly logged in to the network for updates on their friends, and that the average consumer has 130 friends on Facebook.

“This has become a very powerful dynamic for brands to engage and learn from consumers,” he says. “In social media, you have to make sure that you’re listening to consumers—that you’re taking the opportunity to learn about their interactions with your products. This is the world’s largest focus group, and to just inject yourself into social communication without understanding how consumers are engaging with your brand is a wasted effort.”

In a related announcement, Coupons.com said it has launched a clearing and settlement service for digital coupons, allowing the company not only to create, distribute and host digital coupons but to handle their redemption and payment as well. The company already operates a paper-based coupon clearing business.