Searching for discount vouchers in the UK has increased by 47% in the past 12 months.

Hitwise, the leading online competitive intelligence service and an Experian company, last week revealed that UK Internet searches for discount vouchers have increased by 47.5% over the last 12 months. This not only reveals that the recession has resulted in some very smart online shoppers proving all theories that shoppers will turn to the internet to find bargains.

Although growth in searching for generalised terms such as ‘vouchers’ and ‘coupons’ has plateaued specific keyword phrases directly referring to stores or products has dramatically risen with the number of searchers quadrupling.

After retailers, restaurants are the sector that has benefited most from the growth in online vouchers over the last 12 months, with the sector now picking up 6.7% of all UK Internet traffic from voucher searches.

Optimising vouchers and special offers was a common practise some 10 years ago, and seemed to have been dying down but with the current recession it is clear that restaurants are once again trying to attract the thrifty customer looking to cut back on expenditures.

One example of how successful a campaign focussed on special offers can be is the Paramount RestaurantGroup, through the implementation of an email voucher campaign the chain of restaurants managed to grow online bookings by 150%. Similarly Pizza Express who have built up a reputation of good food offer online vouchers for 2 for 1 pizzas, through the power of word of mouth and email the vouchers have been very successful with very little people turning up to eat without a voucher nowadays. However, several critics have questioned the damage vouchers and heavy discounting could do to the long term image, positioning and success of a brand; Pizza Express has established itself as a ‘upper level’ high street restaurant, will heavy discounts not cheapen this image?

Discounting increases customer acquisition at the moment, but when the recession is over will it have a lasting effect? Will these brands be able to revert back to their old prices or even compete with the emerging brands looking to capture the market they may have lost?

Tags: online vouchers

This entry was posted on Monday, September 7th, 2009 at 10:45 am and is filed under Online Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.