Don't Believe Everything You Read - Daily Deal Sites Can Work!

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Category: Our Blog

Created on Tuesday, May 07 2013 10:53

Written by Wes

You’d believe from all the hate that’s been written about daily deal sites, and how they are now all a thing of the past as a method to market your local business, we wouldn’t like them either. You’d be wrong. There’s quite a bit that goes into making daily deal sites work for your local business, and a few well-publicized failures, shouldn’t end up being 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 quite a bit in common, particularly a evident misunderstanding of exactly how to run a daily deal promotion, poor negotiation of their deals, and not tracking their 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 have been going through are often cited causes of dislike. The press is quick to point out the unfavorable aspects of some daily deal sites. They typical point out things like spam complaints, a crowded marketplace of daily deals to select from, “deal hoppers”, customers who hop from deal to deal and seldom become a regular customer.

3 Ways you can help make Daily Deals work for your business

• Know just how the money works! – Make sure you know how the numbers work in your deal. Determine what your average sale is and don’t try to exceed it with a daily deal. Also, make sure you negotiate credit card processing fees, as many of the daily deal sites will pick these up.
• Have a strategy for following up – Up to 75 percent of those 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 that you can learn the basics and not be overloaded by the deals, and leave a sour taste in everyone’s mouth.

The death of Daily deal sites is grossly overstated, and you can still use these to grow your business, if you take the time to do it correctly!