Give Daily Deal Sites Another Look
You’d believe from all the hate that’s been reported about daily deal sites, and how they are all a thing of the past as a method to market your small business, we wouldn’t like them either. You’d be wrong. There’s quite a bit that goes into making daily deal sites enhance your local business, and a few well-publicized failures, shouldn’t be the reason to avoid using the daily deal model. As a matter of fact, once you look closely, the lion’s share of them “failures” had plenty in common, particularly a evident misunderstanding of precisely how to run a daily deal promotion, poor negotiation of their deals, and not keeping track of their new customers redemption and spending. Given that they had unbelievable fails in these areas, is it any wonder they failed?
But why all the hate mail?
One reason could be the financial struggles Groupon and LivingSocial have been undergoing. Although they probably will come out fine at the end of the day, financial writers wanting to seize upon the harmful aspects of some daily deal sites. They regularly point to things like spam complaints, a glut of deals from which to choose, deal hoppers (customers who hop from deal to deal with no intention of becoming a regular customer) and in deal fatigue.
3 Ways for you to help make Daily Deals work for your business
- Know just how the money works! – Be sure that you know how the numbers work in your deal. Understand what your average sale is and don’t attempt to exceed it with a daily deal. Also, be sure to negotiate credit card processing fees, as many of the daily deal sites will pick these up.
- Have a strategy for following up – As high as 75 percent of these daily deal customers are new to you, so be sure that you have a plan in place to entice them to return, whether that be another coupon, or….?
- Don’t start too fast – Begin somewhat cautiously, so you can master how the daily deal model works in your business, then scale up when the time is right.
The demise of Daily deal sites is grossly overstated, and you can still use these to grow your small business, if you take the time to do it correctly!
