Pricing Strategies: #4 Counting on Discounts

"Is there any chance I can get a little discount on this month's service?"

Maya hears this almost every time at her fitness studio. She offers monthly subscription plans for various services, including yoga, strength training, wellness sessions, and personal training. Customers loved the classes, but they also loved looking for small savings whenever they could.

Some were first-timers hoping for a welcome deal.

Some were long-time clients asking for a loyalty benefit.

Others were referred by friends and were hoping for a referral discount.

 

At first, Maya tried to handle discounts manually by editing the invoice, creating a custom price and applying ad-hoc reductions. But as her studio grew, with multiple centres and more clients requesting discounts, she clearly understood that discounts weren't just giveaways; they were a strategic way to drive signups, retain customers, reward loyalty, and promote sales.

Unlike Maya, there are several thousand businesses and service providers who have considered offering discounts, but they end up creating a mess or stop midway due to an inappropriate configuration.

In this article, we are going to cover how Coupons in Zoho Billing offer convenience for giving discounts, setting up logic, and being transparent in their offerings.

Coupons in Zoho Billing 

Coupons allow you to apply controlled, rule-based discounts to subscriptions, invoices and addons. They help businesses attract customers, increase conversions and maintain long-term loyalty without losing control over revenue.

Zoho Billing's coupon system includes a wide range of powerful capabilities. Let's explore each of them in detail.

Discount Type 

Zoho Billing lets you design coupons with the discount calculation you want. It is done in two ways,

• Percentage-based discount. (Example 10% off)

• Flat rate discount. (Example $10 off)

Strategic Advantage:

Percentage discounts attract attention. It can be used for promotional sales and new customer incentives. At the same time, flat rate discounts maintain margin clarity, which can be used for targeted reductions or compensation credits. Align your discount type with your revenue model.

How are Discounts Deducted? 

The discount application affects how the subscriber actually experiences savings. Zoho Billing supports,

• Plan-level discount: Applied only for subscription plan pricing.

• Addon level discount: Applied only to selected addons.

• Invoice level discount: Applied to the total invoice amount.

• Recurring or one-time discounts: Apply either repeatedly or once, depending on how they are defined.

Strategic Advantage:

Control precisely where the discount applies so that promotions don't unintentionally reduce assured revenue.

Setting Up Expiry 

Coupons can be time-bound, ensuring urgency and promotional control. You can choose between,

• No expiry

• Specific calendar date for a limited promotional period.

Strategic Advantage:

Use expiries to create urgency ("Offer ends this Sunday!"), regulate campaign periods and avoid long-tern unintentional discounts.

Maximum Redemption 

Not all discounts are meant to be universal. Zoho Billing lets you limit how many times a coupon can be redeemed across all customers. You can set the redemption times as the number of times the discount gets applied to a subscription.

This is done to

• Prevent discount misuse.

• Keep promotions budget-friendly

• Make time-based campaigns more straightforward to manage.

Strategic Advantage:

Scarcity increases desire. Limited redemption coupons can rapidly boost signups.   

 Advanced Coupon  Management

Advanced Coupon Management addresses key challenges, including coupon duplication, eligibility control, and improved discount management. By enabling advanced coupons, the following configurations can be set up:

Customer Eligibility:

Advanced Coupon lets you define who can redeem the coupon. This is ideal for targeting specific groups, such as elite customers, new sign-ups, or high-value subscribers.

Example: Providing a 20% first-time discount for New signups.

Product Eligibility:

By creating separate coupons for different products, Advance coupons let you specify which product, plan, or addon is eligible for a discount. This way, you can configure coupons globally for all products.

Example: A coupon can be valid for "Plan A" and "Addon A" from "Product A", but restricted from use on "Product B".

Maximum Redemption Per Customer:

Businesses can now limit a coupon for a customer for a specific number of times, preventing excessive redemptions.

Example: A customer can redeem a 10% discount coupon for only two cycles, after which it becomes invalid.  

Strategic Advantage:

Advanced coupons help design lifecycle-based discounts (onboarding, reactivation, upsell nudges, etc) that increase retention.

Additional Coupon Codes 

Zoho Billing lets businesses generate multiple coupon codes linked to the same discount rule. You can create this in bulk or import it into the system, and it can be used.

A primary coupon is created by defining the discount structure (percentage or fixed amount), the maximum number of redemptions, and the expiry date. You can generate multiple coupons that link back to the Default Coupon in the following ways:

​
Manually Entering Codes: If you want to assign specific codes for tracking or personalisation. This will be helpful for small promotional campaigns.

​
Auto-Generate Codes: If you are running a large-scale campaign, you can let the system generate a batch of unique codes in bulk by defining the prefix, suffix, and the number of characters it takes.

This helps in,

• Tracking which marketing channel performs best.

• Personalising codes by customer segment.

• Running simultaneous campaigns using different code names.

• Avoiding manual discount creation to prevent duplication.

Strategic Advantage:

Multi-code campaigns let you measure Return on Investment across social media, email, influencers, events, referral sources and so on, all with the sample discount logic.

 What Coupons Do for Your Business 

Coupons are more than just discounts; they are a customer behaviour tool that drives more than just monetary advantage for a business. Different coupon configurations provide different outcomes.

They help you,

• Increase signups with welcome offers.

• Reactivate old customers with comeback incentives.

• Encourage plan upgrades with timed discounts.

• Drive referral and viral sharing.

• Introduce urgency that pushes customers to act.

 Coupons help businesses attract, retain, and re-engage customers while maintaining complete control over the revenue. Not all discounts are equal, but with the right system, they become a competitive advantage.

Up Next: Stay local & sell global.

 

• Topic Participants

• Hari Hara Sudhan. S

  

• Sticky Posts

• Community Learning Series | Digest #5 — September 2020

  Dear customers, We're happy to bring you the September edition of our #CommunityDigest! Keep track of your subscription KPIs right from your smartphone: Last month, we enhanced our Android mobile app to help our customers get daily updates on their business health. We got to know from a lot of customers that this has made their job much more easier because they no longer have to keep a reminder to manually check on the previous day's revenue or activations. If you have not downloaded it yet, here's

• Community Learning Series | Digest #4 - August 2020

  Dear customers, We hope you're staying safe and healthy. I'm happy to bring you the fourth edition of our #CommunityDigest with some brand-new updates from us. 1. Daily Business Updates (for Android users) The Zoho Subscriptions Android app has got a cool new update: You can now get a push notification to your smartphone that lets you know how many activations and cancellations have taken place, and what's the net revenue for the previous day. The best part is, you can tell the app when exactly you

• Community Learning Series | Digest #3 - July 2020

  Dear customers, We hope you're staying safe and healthy. We're glad to bring you the July edition of our #CommunityDigest. New community members can view our previous newsletters here. This time, we have two major updates and three interesting topics for you: 1. Zoho Subscriptions Developer Community Since the inception of Zoho Subscriptions, our team believed that the recurring billing platform we provide should be able to offer an extensive API library that empowers businesses to automate most

• Introducing: Community Learning Series | Digest #1 - May 2020

  Dear customers, We hope you are staying safe and healthy. Helping businesses manage their customer subscriptions more efficiently has always been, and always will be, our goal at Zoho Subscriptions. We strongly believe this is possible if we grow together as a community and share what we know with each other. To nurture this shared learning experience, here is our brand-new Community Learning Series! ​ Welcome to the first edition of our digest! Each edition of our community digest includes guides

• Recent Topics

• On Edit Validation Blueprint

  Hello, I have a notes field and a signature field. When the Approve button is clicked, the Signature field will appear and must be filled in. When the Reject button is clicked, the Notes field will appear and must be filled in. Question: Blueprint will

• How do I link my invoice to an estimate?

  There has been instances where I have created estimates, however, invoices for the same estimate were created independently. The status of these estimates hasn't converted to 'invoiced'. 

• Zoho Books (and other finance suite apps) - Retrospective Linking of Invoice and Sales Orders to Quotes.

  In some cases, Quotes and Invoies may be created sperately instead of using the convert feature. In this feature request I am asking for the Finance Suite team to consider adding a lookup field to reference the quote on Invoices and Sales Orders, or some

• Impossible to import Journal from Freshbooks

  I have been trying to import journals from Freshbooks since August 30th. Every time I try to import, I get an error message. I have already made sure every row has a date. First it was saying the account and notes had unexpected input and that every debit/credit

• Zoho Payroll's USA and KSA editions are available in Zoho One!

  Greetings! We’re excited to share that Zoho Payroll, currently available only in India and the UAE, is now introducing the KSA (Kingdom of Saudi Arabia) edition and the USA (United States of America) edition, and these editions are now available in Zoho

• Peppol: Accept Bill (Belgium)

  Hi, This topic might help you if you're facing the same in Belgium. We are facing an issue while accepting a supplier bill received by Peppol in Zoho Books. There is a popup with an error message: This bill acceptance could not be completed, so it was

• CRM x WorkDrive: We're rolling out the WorkDrive-powered file storage experience for existing users

  Release plan: Gradual rollout to customers without file storage add-ons, in this order: 1. Standalone CRM 2. CRM Plus and Zoho One DCs: All | Editions: All Available now for: - Standalone CRM accounts in Free and Standard editions without file storage

• Manage Every Customer Conversation from Every Channel inside Zoho SalesIQ

  Your customers message you from everywhere. But are you really able to track, manage, and follow through on every conversation, without missing anything? With interactions coming in from websites, mobile apps, and messaging platforms like WhatsApp and

• Subheaders for Sections in forms

  Currently, every form section has a field name, which one can choose to show/hide to the end user. It would be great if there was an option to show a SUB-HEADER in addition to a header. It would be useful for explaining to the end user what the section

• Antispam validation failed for your domain in Accounts

  I tried adding a domain to zeptomail.zoho.com, but the “add domain” operation failed. The front‑end error reads: “Domain could not be added. Please contact support@zeptomail.com.” The back‑end API returned: ``` { "error": { "code": "TM_3601", "details":

• Convert invoice from zoho to xml with all details

  How to convert an Invoice to XML format with all details

• Prevent subform editing on a module's detail's page

  Hi everyone, We would like to prevent any editing of the subform data in the : Create page Edit page Details page (as subform editing is now allowed by the recent UX update) We are able to prevent editing by making the subform fields read only in the

• Export Invoices to XML file

  Namaste! ZOHO suite of Apps is awesome and we as Partner, would like to use and implement the app´s from the Financial suite like ZOHO Invoice, but, in Portugal, we can only use certified Invoice Software and for this reason, we need to develop/customize on top of ZOHO Invoice to create an XML file with specific information and after this, go to the government and certified the software. As soon as we have for example, ZOHO CRM integrated with ZOHO Invoice up and running, our business opportunities

• Refresh frequency

  Dear Zoho Team, I really, truly appreciate that Zoho Books gets frequent updates. As a matter of fact this is how a good SaaS company should stay on top. However, I feel that I have to hit refresh almost every day. This was exciting at the beginning but

• Zoho Books | Product updates | January 2026

  Hello users, We’ve rolled out new features and enhancements in Zoho Books. From e-filing Form 1099 directly with the IRS to corporation tax support, explore the updates designed to enhance your bookkeeping experience. E-File Form 1099 Directly With the

• Weekly Tips : Save Time with Saved Search

  Let's assume your work requires you to regularly check emails from important clients that have attachments and were sent within a specific time period. Instead of entering the same conditions every time—like sender, date range, and attachments included—you

• Bring real app analytics into Zoho Creator apps with Zoho Apptics

  We’re kicking off the year with a release we’ve been looking forward to for a long time. After being in the works for a while, Zoho Creator and Zoho Apptics are now officially integrated, bringing in-depth product analytics directly into the Zoho Creator

• Discontinuing Zoho Showtime service on May 30, 2026

  Hello everyone, We have some important news. Zoho ShowTime, our online training platform, reached its end of life on December 31, 2025, and its services will be fully shut down on May 30, 2026, paving the way for TrainerCentral, a more comprehensive training

• emailing estimates

  Shows up in the customer mail logs as sent but nobody is receiving them, even when I send them to myself I don't get them ??? Something wrong with the mail server or my end ?

• Ability to CC on a mass email

  Ability to CC someone on a mass email.

• No background for video recordings, no playback speed, can't even playback longer recordings - have to download…

  Hi. We utilize heavily video messages on Slack, but wanted to migrate to Cliq with Zoho One, however very basic yet very frequently used feature is missing: backgrounds for video recordings and playback speed. We were not happy with Slack's 5 minute limits

• Bookings duration - days

  Hi team, Is there any way to setup services/bookings that span multiple days? I am using Zoho Bookings for meeting room bookings. Clients may wish to book a room for more than one day, for up to a month.  If not, is there a plan to allow services to be setup with durations of Days as well as hours and minutes? Many thanks, Anna.

• Customer address in Zoho Bookings

  Hello,  Is it possible to add customer address information to the Zoho bookings appointment screen? Or have it pull that information automatically from the CRM? We are wanting to use this as a field management software but it is difficult to pull the address from multiple sources when it would be ideal to have a clickable address on the appointment screen that opens up the user's maps.  It would also be advantageous for the "list view" to show appointment times instead of just duration and booking

• Organize and manage PDFs with Zoho PDF Editor's dashboard

  Hello users, Zoho PDF Editor's dashboard is a one-stop place to upload, sort, share PDF files, and more. This article will explore the various capabilities that Zoho PDF Editor's dashboard offers. A few highlights of Zoho PDF Editor's dashboard: Upload

• Feature Request - Allow Customers To Pick Meeting Duration

  Hi Bookings Team, It would be great if there was an option to allow customers to pick a duration based on a max and minimum amount of time defined by me and in increments defined by me. For example, I have some slots which are available for customers

• New feature: Invite additional guests for your bookings

  Hello everyone, Greetings from Zoho Bookings! We are happy to announce the much-awaited feature Guest Invite, which enhances your booking experience like never before. This feature allows additional participants to be invited for the bookings to make

• Changing the owner of a call

  Am I correct in my conclusion that I cannot change the owner of a call in Zoho? The field does not show up in the screen, nor can I make it show up as the systems does not give me that option. I cannot "mass update" it either. I tried it, but Zoho refuses to change the name of the owner. Please help out: how do I change the owner of a call.

• Unified Notes View For Seamless Collaboration

  To facilitate better coordination among different departments and team members, the notes added to a record can now be accessed in all its associated records. With this, team members, from customer service representatives to field technicians, can easily

• Remove Profiles from "Forecast" Module

  How can I remove Profiles from My forecast Module? Image Below The only revenue generators are the VP's, and the Estimation Managers, and the Estimators subordinate to the Est. Managers. How can I remove the unused Profiles? Its frustrating to see them

• Integrate Excel or Zoho Sheet functions / calculations to CRM product module

  Hello Community, I hope someone more experienced can help me with this question. Our price / payment plan calculations are in an Excel spreadsheet and I would like to use all those functions / calculations in my Products module. So when we send a quote

• Sync CRM Contacts to USER'S contacts on Office 365

  I can see that the O365 sync is transferring contacts backwards and forwards between Zoho CRM and Office365. But it has created a separate address book in Office 365 called "Zoho CRM Contacts". This address book is not used by Office/Outlook's email function

• Uplifted homepage experience

  Editions: All editions. Availability update: 17th February 2026: All editions in the CA and SA DC | JP DC (Free, Standard and Professional editions) 23 February 2026: JP (All Editions) | AU, CN (Free, Standard, Professional editions) 27 February 2026:

• Logging Out of FSM

  I have tried to log out of FSM app of the last person and it will not let me do so. I need to log in to my account.

• Restoring records from the recycle bin programatically

  Background I'm working on a piece of software to automate conversion of Leads into Deals based on order status from my company's website. The process is mostly complete, right now I'm just working on handling a few edge cases to ensure data integrity.

• Does Zoho Learn integrate with Zoho Connect,People,Workdrive,Project,Desk?

  Can we propose Zoho LEarn as a centralised Knowledge Portal tool that can get synched with the other Zoho products and serve as a central Knowledge repository?

• All new Address Field in Zoho CRM: maintain structured and accurate address inputs

  Availability Update: 29 September 2025: It's currently available for all new sign-ups and for existing Zoho CRM orgs which are in the Professional edition exclusively for IN DC users. 2 March 2026: Available to users in all DCs except US and EU DC. Latest

• Create static subforms in Zoho CRM: streamline data entry with pre-defined values

  Last modified on (9 July, 2025): This feature was available in early access and is currently being rolled out to customers in phases. Currently available for users in the the AU, CA, and SA DCs. It will be enabled for the remaining DCs in the next couple

• SalesIQ Identity Update for Logged In Wordpress User

  Hey folks, SalesIQ does not automatically detect when a visitor logs in to WordPress and update their identity to match. For example, if a client of ours visits the site and logs in, SalesIQ will not track them correctly by default. The Solution The solution

• Feature Request – Conditional Visitor Information Request in Zoho SalesIQ

  We would like to request the ability to conditionally ask for visitor details based on the communication channel used in Zoho SalesIQ. Specifically: When a visitor initiates a conversation through the live chat widget on the website, we want to continue

• Add zoho calendar to google calendar

  Hi I keep seeing instructions on how to sync Zoho CRM calendar with google calendar but no instructions on how to view Zoho calendar in my google calendar.

• Next Page