If you are considering using a Daily Deals campaign to find new 
customers for your small business, it is important to plan and prepare in advance. The lure of Daily Deals campaigns is being able to reach prospects who haven’t tried your service with an enticing offer that will bring them in your door. The challenge is then converting those prospects into profitable, loyal customers. A Rice University study indicates that close to 80% of deal users were new customers, significantly fewer users spent beyond the deal’s value or returned to purchase at full price. http://www.media.rice.edu/media/NewsBot.asp?MODE=VIEW&ID=15875&SnID=2 The success of your Daily Deals campaign rides on your ability to create a plan in advance of the campaign and execute on that plan following the campaign.
First, selecting the Daily Deals provider and the right campaign offer is critical. Here are three questions to ask yourself:
- Do you know who your best customers are?
- What do they buy that makes them your best customer?
- What makes them a loyal buyer?
Being able to answer these questions will help you to determine which daily deals company is the best fit for you and what offers are going to attract the right prospects. How do you find this out? Profile your customers. You can do this by looking at the data you maintain on them. External profiling tools give you a demographic and behavioral view of your customers. You can use this data to select the Daily Deals company that has the most similar target audience in their opt-in email database. For example, is PlumDistrict more closely aligned to your customers than LivingSocial? Or, where available, you can select from within the Daily Deal company’s database on preferences that match your best customers.
The data that you maintain on your customers, such as purchase information, cross-sell data and lifetime value data, can help you in structuring the right type of deal for your business. For example, if you know that your salon customers will usually buy the additional skin care products when they purchase the premium facial, then create your offer around the premium facial service and make sure to have awareness building merchandising of the skin care products in place when your campaign runs. Selecting the right offer sets the stage for future or add-on purchases. Make sure that you understand who your best customers are before you look to attact more of them.
Finally, create marketing plans around how you will nurture these daily deals prospects or leads throughout the campaign and after the campaign. Make sure you capture information that allows you to add them to your email list, or mailing list. Create follow-up campaigns and social engagment that allows you to start building a relationship.
Daily Deals can be a successful way to reach a new audience as long as you prepare and know who you want to reach and how to make the most of the leads you generate.