Don’t Believe Everything You Read – Daily Deal Sites CAN Work!
You’d think from all the hate that’s been written about daily deal sites, and the way they are now all a thing of the past as an effective way 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 stop the daily deal model. As a matter of fact, once you look closely, the lion’s share of these “failures” had a whole lot 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?
The well-publicized financial and structural changes Groupon and LivingSocial are going through are often cited reasons for dislike. The press is quick to point out the unfavorable issues with some daily deal sites. They typically point out things like spam complaints, a crowded marketplace of daily deals to choose from, “deal hoppers”, customers who hop from deal to deal and seldom become a regular customer.
3 Ways for you to help make Daily Deals work for your business
- Understand the financials! – Make sure you clearly understand the numbers as far as your deal is concerned. Know your average sales volume and don’t extend past it with a daily deal. Negotiate credit card processing fees: most major daily deal sites will pay these!
- Have a strategy for following up – Up to 75 percent of these daily deal customers are new to you, so be sure that you have a plan set up to entice them to return, whether that be another coupon, or….?
- Don’t go too big, too fast – Start conservatively, so you can learn the basics and not be swamped by the deals, and leave a sour taste in everyone’s mouth.
