In a perfect retail world, retailers would sell every product every time at full margin. Yet that’s hardly a business model many merchants can bank on.

Special purchases, promotions and loyalty programs all seek to attract new customers without alienating existing ones by offering selected goods for less than manufacturer-suggested prices.

Then there’s the coupon. A front-page article in The Wall Street Journal last spring noted that Campbell Soup reported a 20 percent increase in paper coupon redemption in the previous 12 months, no doubt as a result of the economic downturn.

And a recent survey on coupon use and interest (responses collected in Q4 2008) finds 78 percent of U.S. consumers use newspaper coupons, and 40 percent say they are likely to use coupons accessed online, according to Platform-A and Information Resources.

The study, which surveys adults about their current usage of newspaper coupons and their interest in digital ones, found that regardless of whether the shopping is being done online or in stores, the type of coupon consumers favor varies by age. The younger the consumers, the more comfortable they are with accessing coupons online: 51 percent of 18- to 24-year-old shoppers indicate they would be very likely to use coupons presented to them online.

Whatever their ages, consumers’ acceptance of e-mail coupons bodes well for a new solution from ExactTarget, an Indianapolis-based provider of on-demand e-mail and one-to-one marketing solutions. ExactTarget provides a SaaS application that does not require a retailer to invest in technology or hardware.

“People simply don’t have time to sit down on Sunday morning and cut coupons anymore,” says COO Scott McCorkle. “But if they can receive live, personalized offers via e-mail for stores and e-commerce sites they frequent, they are much more likely to act on a given sale.”

With that in mind, ExactTarget launched Live Offers, a closed-loop solution for managing, delivering and monitoring intelligent offers to its entire base of prospects and customers. Scott Roth, ExactTarget’s director of product marketing, says it is the first offer-management and coupon solution from an e-mail service provider that has the capacity to render offers at the time that e-mails are opened, instead of when they are sent.

“Our whole value proposition as a company is to allow our clients to be the most targeted and relevant to their individual subscribers and that goes back to our mission,” Roth says. “That one-on-one relationship helps retailers foster that relationship over time.”

Many retailers still mount broader-based campaigns aimed at attracting a first-time shopper who can be developed into a loyal customer, Roth explains. Therefore, “our technology is flexible” and was designed to allow retailers to easily coordinate campaigns with both distribution and redemption caps and unique segment or subscriber-specific offers, Roth says.

Unique code
If, for example, 10,000 subscribers are designated to receive a 25 percent-off coupon but the retailer only wants 1,000 coupons to be redeemed, the application will provide a unique code to the first 1,000 subscribers who open the e-mail coupon. The remaining e-mail subscribers will get an alternate message or another offer designated by the retailer.

The Live Offers technology combines prior lead generation historical data, e-mail transactional data history and purchase history to ensure the consumer/subscriber receives highly personalized, targeted offers he is likely to redeem. ExactTarget also provides e-mail support for out-of-stock product alerts, shopping cart abandonment follow-up, order confirmation with up/cross-sell and other features important to retailers.

“We want retailers to offer a unique coupon for each individual that then can be tracked back through their POS systems,” Roth says. The openness of the Live Offers solution allows for a seamless ability to exchange offer and conversion data between in-store POS, e-commerce or other business systems.

Retailers can more accurately measure the ROI of a campaign, he says, and remarket to individuals who have (or have not) redeemed the offers that they have received.