A Couponing Threesome… how Hearst subscribes
We’ve often talked about the perfect threesome that couponing, newspapers and today’s economy makes and recent action by Hearst, supports this notion.
We learned today that Hearst has formed a partnership with Coupons.com. Hearst plans to incorporate deals, coupons and special offers on their Delish site, thanks to this new-found partnership.
Either way, Hearst couldn’t have picked a better partner as Coupons.com remains to be loyal to blending its use of new media, with a favorite and now necessary pass time (couponing) to increase its reach. In December, the online coupon site announced its Facebook application, which allows users to print and share coupons of interest with friends. The application has about 700 active monthly users and this number does not account for coupons that have been shared using the application. A visit to the coupon site as well, gives you a sense of their focus on making the site easy to use. A neat feature that comes to mind and reminds me of many online shopping sites that I subscribe to is the ‘clipped and savings’ feature. I can select the coupons I am interested in, save them to my profile for easy printing once I have finished perusing all of the deals, and all the while, I get a visual on each page of the sum of money I have saved collectively. So, not only does the average user feel great about the money they’ve saved, but a user suddenly starts to think of Coupons.com as being synonymous with saving money. Not too bad for a coupon sites brand identity.
Although I am in favor of the Hearst/Coupons.com relationship, I still think the better play for Hearst would now be to get a white labeled version of the Coupon.com site and place that within their individual newspaper sites. Statistics still show that 53 percent of households get their coupons from the Sunday newspaper. Adding an online element to couponing to each newspaper property will help in increasing site usage and will allow these couponers’ to stay with the newspaper brand, before realizing the ease sites such as Coupons.com, GoceryCoupons.com, BigCrumbs.com, etc…. Publishers, again, would be naive to thing that couponing is something that is protected in their printed flyers or ROP ads.
