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

• Marketing Tip #1: Optimize item titles for SEO

  Your item title is the first thing both Google and shoppers notice. Instead of a generic “Leather Bag,” go for something detailed like “Handcrafted Leather Laptop Bag – Durable & Stylish.” This helps your items rank better in search results and instantly

• Remove Due Date from Statements

  Is it possible to remove the Due Date on the Invoice transation line on statements? I have figured work arounds to get the Invoice detail on the Statement but cannot work out haw to simplify the stament by removing the "- due on xx/xx/2026" - it really

• Cliq iOS can't see shared screen

  Hello, I had this morning a video call with a colleague. She is using Cliq Desktop MacOS and wanted to share her screen with me. I'm on iPad. I noticed, while she shared her screen, I could only see her video, but not the shared screen... Does Cliq iOS is able to display shared screen, or is it somewhere else to be found ? Regards

• Displaying only unread tickets in ticket view

  Hello, I was wondering if someone might be able to help me with this one. We use filters to display our ticket list, typically using a saved filter which displays the tickets which are overdue or due today. What I'd really like is another filter that

• How can I filter inactive/disable agent tickets?

  Hello, We have an user-agent that left the company and we inactive/disabled his agent. So, now I can no longer filter or search tickets that he is the current owner, or even create a rule to reassign tickets to another person when the ticket is reopen.

• How do i move multiple tickets to a different department?

  Hello, i have several tickets that have been assigned to the wrong department.  I am talking about hundreds of automatically generated ones that come from a separate system. How can i select them all at once to move them to another department in one go? I can select them in "unsassigned open tickets view" but i can't find a "move to another department" option. I also can't seem to assign multiple tickets to the same agent in that same view. Could somebody advice?

• Add Reauthentication Option for Zoho Bug Tracker Integration in Zoho Desk

  Hello Zoho Desk Team, We hope you're doing well. We would like to request an enhancement to the Zoho Bug Tracker integration within Zoho Desk. Current Limitation: At the moment, there is no option to reauthenticate the Zoho Bug Tracker integration in

• Dashboards for Customers

  Is it possible to build dashboards for each customers in the community for their tickets?

• Create Package From A Picklist

  Dear Zoho, Can it be made possible to create a package from a picklist? The reason our company makes a picklist is for that to become a package Our sales orders have 600-1000 items I hope that makes it clear that it's hard to delete 990 items when we

• Migrating from Zoho Checkout to Zoho Billing

  I have an active Zoho Checkout account where I'm charging customers for subscriptions. Now I'm looking to upgrade and only use Zoho BIlling, in which my account in on read only mode at the moment. I can see is also tracking the customers and its payments.

• API - Bank Accounts | Reconciliation Discrepancy

  Unless I'm reading it wrong, the documentation for the Bank Reconciliations API is inconsistent with itself. https://www.zoho.com/books/api/v3/bank-accounts/#create-a-bank-reconciliation The text definition says that the transaction_id should be a string,

• another little issue

  So to get over showing prices with VAT we used the price lists and made the prices inclusive. The problem is now on the items it wants to show the orginal retail value which makes no sense. Ideas please

• Handle Leading Zeros in a Number Field

  Hi, If I use a Number Field, set with Min 7 Digits and Max 7 Digits, and enter 0000001, it will result in 1 and an error as it removes the leading zeros, the same with entering 0012340 will result in 12340 and error. So I have to use a Text Field and

• can't access zoho account

  I can't log in to my zoho account, can you help me

• HTML PDF Templates / Build From Scratch option not visible for Custom Modules

  Hi everyone, I am working with Zoho Books Custom Modules and trying to create a custom 4x4 package label PDF template using HTML/CSS. According to the official Zoho Books documentation for HTML PDF Templates, there should be an option like: Settings →

• Virtual Option for Fields

  Hi, I would like to be able to choose another option other than Read-Only or Disabled, such as Virtual. And with Virtual, the field is shown on the form and avilable in rules, but NOT saved to the Database. A use case is having multiple Large Lists of

• Prefix & Suffix on Single Line, Number, etc.

  Hi, I would like to have the same Prefix and Suffix that was added to the Unique ID on Text and Number Fields. Use case could be as basic as temperature, as per another Idea I have to use Single Line (Text) for a number that might have leading zeros today,

• Customer User Fields for use in Rules

  Hi, I would like to be able to add custom fields to the users, such as Department or Role, which can then be used in Rules, Reports, etc. as a condition. A use case is limiting Global lists or Choices based on the users Custom Field, so one form can be

• Locked out of MFA due to changing phones

  I have been locked out of my Zoho Books account since i changed my mobile phone over. I can get the OTP through the ZOHO Books software but i cant confirm using my phone app as nothing appears to authorise. I need to know how to register/set up my new

• 👍 Zoho CRM's Notes now gets Reactions and a new look

  Available in SA and JP DCs. Rolling out to other DCs in phases. Hello everyone, Notes help users capture important updates, collaborate with teammates, and maintain context for records. Now with Note Reactions, users can quickly acknowledge updates, express

• 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. 24

• Zoho books and venmo

  Hi, Is there a way to hook Venmo into zoho books? I have a Venmo business account and want to be able to sync that. I know you can do it with the paypal integration but I dont want to use paypal for the fees and that doesnt allow me use/integrate my current

• Updating Unit Code for New Item Creation, Quote and Invoicing is so inconvenient

  The Zoho Team has implemented many updates, but these updates should be optional. Before rolling out any new feature, they should already have a solution in place that allows users to remove or disable it if they choose not to use it. Just yesterday,

• Payroll needs to automatically remit taxes, not just give me the calculations

  Wagepoint, PayEvo, Waveapps, etc... All your competitors deposit employee payroll, but they ALSO remit taxes automatically. Get with the program, your Payroll app is extremely sparse.

• Creating new Teams meeting from CRM doesn't enable Team functions in the meeting

  Hi I'm trying to set up the meeting integration and I've seen that when I create a Meeting in the CRM and set the location to Online and the Provider to Teams, and complete the boxes, add a participant etc, whilst the meeting is created in Teams, the

• Approval Process configuration is now more flexible and fully customizable

  The Approval Process is back with an improved user experience designed to make it easier to build structured, flexible, and intuitive approval workflows. Here’s a look at some of the key enhancements: Name Your Rules & Stages You can now give each approval

• Admin Logging in as another User

  How can a Super Admin login as another user. For example, I have a sales rep that is having issues with their Accounts and I want to view their Zoho Account with out having to do a GTM and sharing screens. Latest Update (27th April 2026): With the early

• Introducing Approval SLA for Approval Processes

  Approvals can sometimes be delayed when approvers do not respond within the expected timeframe, which can slow down your recruitment processes. With the new Approval SLA in Zoho Recruit, you can set deadlines for approval requests and define automated

• Introducing Microsoft Word Integration in Zoho Contracts

  We are excited to announce a new feature that brings contract authoring and negotiation in your familiar environment — the Microsoft Word Integration. What This Integration Brings The Microsoft Word Integration connects Zoho Contracts with the Microsoft

• Map My Client Locations for Zoho CRM Extension: Turn CRM Addresses Into Action

  Hello everyone, Your CRM knows who your customers are. Now, see where they are on the interactive map directly from Zoho CRM. Introducing Map My Client Locations for Zoho CRM, an extension built for businesses that rely on sales visits, field service,

• Scheduled and Automated Report Delivery from Zoho Projects

  Zoho Projects has useful reports including task reports, timesheet summaries, and workload charts. However, there is currently no way to schedule these reports to be automatically delivered to stakeholders on a recurring basis. This means: Project managers

• Collaborate Visually with Whiteboard in Zoho Projects

  Whiteboard in Zoho Projects allows you to collaborate visually by creating diagrams, annotating designs, and sketching project workflows using shapes, text, and images within project modules. Team members can work simultaneously, improving productivity

• Fields in MS-Word Template

  With the new MS-Word integration, how does one create fields in an imported MS-Word document which can then automatically be populated with an Intake Form?

• Zoho Bookings Flow Step not Triggering on Appointment booked

  I noticed yesterday that my appointment booked flows were not triggering when we had booked appointments in Zoho Bookings. I checked the trigger and noticed the trigger values updated to be defined to a workspace and service event rather than our whole

• UCP: Why We Killed the Multi-Portal Mess and Simplified Customer Self-Service

  Let's talk about the multi-portal mess nobody wants to admit that it exists. Your customer needs an invoice from one app, wants a ticket update from another, and has a project waiting in a third, each behind its own login, its own UI, its own "was it

• Zoho Tables is now available in Zoho One!

  Hello Zoho One users, We’re excited to announce that Zoho Tables is now included as a part of Zoho One suite! As teams grow, managing projects, approvals, inventories, campaign trackers, and operational workflows across multiple spreadsheets become difficult.

• Zoho Publish is now available in Zoho One!

  Hello Zoho One users, We’re excited to announce that Zoho Publish is now included as part of the Zoho One suite! As businesses grow, managing Google Business Profiles across many locations becomes challenging. Business information needs to stay accurate,

• 📣 Ask the team behind Zoho SalesIQ: Summer '26 Q&A

  Hi everyone! Following our recent webinars, Summer '26 Release: What's New in Zoho SalesIQ—where we walked you through all the new features, what they do, and how they work—and Driving the AI Evolution: Building Smarter Customer Experiences with Zoho

• Upcoming update to field values in Zoho Books - Zoho Analytics integration

  Hello Users, We'd like to inform you of an upcoming update to the tax_category values in the Zoho Books integration for Zoho Analytics from October 20, 2026. What's Changing? tax_category field values are being renamed to align with the conventions already

• Announcing the new SKILL.md for Zoho CRM and the updated OAS repository!

  We are introducing a new zoho-crm skill to make working with Zoho CRM Developer tools (like APIs, functions, widgets, client scripts, queries etc) easier and faster, with the help of AI in your preferred AI harness like Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, VSCode

• Next Page