Most businesses with an online presence have spurned coupons in favor of storewide sales. The thinking was that coupons don’t necessarily encourage buyers to purchase that which they wouldn’t purchase already, and businesses would just end up with less money than they’d otherwise make without the coupon. It was, rather, storewide sales that encouraged buying out of the general range we would normally go.

The recession of 2008 and resulting market crash changed all this, since most of us now think of shopping differently than we used to. Now, more and more shoppers are relying on online coupons. Official numbers by AOL show that more than ninety million consumers currently use coupons. Forty million consumers said they would be very likely to use coupons accessed online.

So, in the end, more and more people expect to use coupons, both paper and online. Both also get people talking about your business, but that generally only works best with the online version, which has a national, or even global reach. Find a coupon for a store in Montana, and you’re in luck if you happen to live in Montana somewhere. But find an online coupon for a free fast food burger or something, and you’re good to go wherever you are, which is probably near every fast food chain anyway. Send the coupon out in an email, and all the sudden swarms will show up for a free burger. And then everyone talks about it and shows up at the local Burger King.

I do it for movies and Amazon promotion codes all the time. And then it becomes a gimmick in my house. (See that chachke? I got it for $4.99 using an online code I got from this guy’s blog…) Then everyone goes, finds it, and then Amazon starts sending them spam, and they buy more stuff. Maybe.

What we’re saying is, online coupons can really get the buzz going, even if it doesn’t make any extra money for the franchise offering it. In the end, they pay off.