4 Ms Hold Secret to Daily Deal Marketing Success

Daily deal marketing sites like Groupon and LivingSocial provide the opportunity for business owners to attract a hundred – or more – new customers in the matter of a few days, giving small businesses a chance to gain market share with deal-buyers.

4 M’s Could Mean Success from Daily Deal Marketing Efforts

M-M-M-Managed Appropriately, Daily Deals Could Provide Meaningful Growth for Small Business

Customer acquisition is a constant concern for most small business owners. But before you jump in to the daily deal marketing game with both feet, position your business in a way that will allow you to capitalize on the traffic influx, neutralize potential negatives and maximize profits for the short and long term.

Margins matter: Businesses best suited for daily deals have higher profit margins.

Businesses with very small profit margins may not be well-suited to daily deal marketing. All of the new customers who may flood your business will be redeeming offers for a product or service for which your business will receive roughly 1/4 (or possibly even less) of its regular price.

Before you sign on for daily deal marketing offers, do the math:

• Most daily deal type of offers represent a 50% net customer discount (or more!)
• The daily deal site will keep 50% of total sales of the deal revenues (or even more) as it’s cut for doing the marketing
• Given the two probabilities above, your business will probably receive only about 25% of the normal cost of the product or service represented in the deal
• But not so fast!  In most cases, you will probably have to wait 3 or 4 months to receive any of the proceeds from sales of your offer from the daily deal site

For many businesses, the deal itself may not be profitable; however, there are ways to improve revenues for your business. Use display marketing, upselling and sales of accessories and add-ons to enhance revenues with shoppers who take advantage of your deal (*88% of customers who took advantage of a daily deal offer spent more than the deal’s value when they visited the participating business).

Market for the Bounce Back: Businesses that succeed with daily deal promotions have a plan to get the customer to return.

From the very beginning, make sure you’re marketing for the bounce back. *68% of those who redeemed daily deal offers came back again without an additional discount.

From the first moment a daily deal customer makes contact with your business, you should be focusing on delivering a better customer experience than they receive from competitors – given the likelihood that they have likely been buying the same types of products or services you sell from a local competitor.

Make sure you have a means of gathering contact information and ask permission to send them information about future offers. After your transaction with them is complete, send them a thank you note, request for online review or feedback and some type of invitation to come back.

Inviting them to return could come in the form of a bounce back offer, such as an invitation to join your rewards program, offers for add-ons or accessories to their initial purchase or other invitations that motivate them to take the next step toward becoming a regular customer of your business.

Mitigate for potential negatives: Plan for common effects of daily deal promotions to keep regular customers and employees happy.

Daily deals can produce positive results for a business, but they can also come with negative side effects. For instance, if a daily deal offer is only redeemable by new customers, loyal customers may be offended that they can’t take advantage of its special pricing.

If your business is overrun with people redeeming offers for days – or weeks – loyal customers may be inconvenienced in the process if they can’t book appointments at desired times or you don’t have enough inventory or supplies to meet demand.