Don't ignore "dollar bills" in your email!

"Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.”–Thomas Edison

As Thomas Edison said, most of the shoppers miss opportunities to save money on their shopping bill by ignoring "dollar bills" they have in their email.

“Dollar bills” in email? You might be thinking we are crazy, here is another quote from one of our friend, who is effective coupon user (and business man). 

“Every coupon is like a dollar bill, do you trash dollar bills? NO. Then you shouldn’t ignore coupons, use them properly to save money”.

Most of the emails we receive in our inbox does contain coupons, but unfortunate part is going through these emails “looks like work” and we ignore them, hence we are missing opportunity to save. How can we solve this? Well, before jumping onto solution, let us try to understand few details about these emails:

A promotional (email) from store can be categorized into one of the following:

1) Coupon
      Definition: In marketing, a coupon is a ticket or document that can be exchanged for a financial discount or  rebate when purchasing a product.
       For example: 25% off on jewelry at JCPenny with code SAVE25

2) Sale
      Definition: An event or occasion during which a business sells goods or services at price that are lower than usual.     
       For example: Traders Joe: Bananas are $2 today sale (was $3 )
       No coupon code required. 

3) Promotion (or) information
      Definition: Promotion refers to raising customer awareness of a product or brand, generating sales, and creating brand loyalty.
     For example: New summer styles available at Macys. 
     This is pure promotional material to provide information about what is new.

Does it make sense to ignore store emails?

It depends on what you mean by "promotion", if you mean item 3 from above list, answer could be yes, BUT remember 80% of emails will fall into either 1 (or) 2. 

EzCouponTracker team observed that average value of Coupon/Sale email is 30%, by effectively using promotional emails shoppers can save average 30% on their bill (when we convert this into dollar bills, average $30 per $100).

Now let us discuss about what we can do to uncover ““looks like work” and make this process simple.
 1) Separating “information” email from “coupons” 
 2) Sorting “coupon” emails based on expiry date 
 3) Nice summary about coupon (which helps us quickly decide whether coupon is useful or not). 

EzCouponTracker does exactly these steps to reduce your work on managing/organizing “coupon emails”. Now that you have solution, why ignore “dollar bills” in your email, have them help you in your savings.

 Picture crtsy: http://www.greenstep.com/content/opportunity-overview