Groupon.com is a powerful method to have customers knocking down your door. Testimonials from other businesses that have used this site are nothing short of shattering. They describe their site as “It helps you gain new customers that are searching for new ways to enjoy your city.” You are guaranteed a massive amount of customers due to the fact they have already spent money with you before even stepping foot in your door. Their research shows that after you run an offer, 9 of 10 new customers found the business by purchasing a Groupon offer from your business. The site continues to grow with their daily deals and is in over 70 major cities and has attracted over 5 million users.
How it works: Groupon works on a collective buying principal combined with social media to bring hundreds and in most cases a thousand or more new customers in one day to your business. They feature a ‘daily offer’ that showcases the best each city has to offer. No matter your business, retail to sightseeing, restaurants to museums, they showcase it.
The offer is showcased on the main page for the selected city. A minimum number of users need to buy the offer for it to become active. This makes it worth your while and saves you from just a few buyers and no real long term customer base increase. By requiring a minimum, usually 100, your customers and you get rewarded.
The coolest aspect of Groupon is the descriptions of your business their team of really creative writers will whip up for you. It mixes humor with customer pulling ad copy to really maximize the amount of customers that will buy your offer. Your offer get’s emailed out to their list of tens of thousands in each city the morning it goes live. By combining the viral power of social media, you will have thousands of eyes on your offer and usually hundreds of offers sold by noon that day.
You’re thinking, what’s the catch? Well not much really when you look at the new customers and instant sales it will bring you. Free to run an offer but Groupon does take a portion of each offer they sell for you. Stats show that the average ticket price is 20% higher than the offer, so you will not lose money when customers redeem their offer. It is also comforting to know that of the thousands of small businesses featured, 97% have returned and run another offer!
After you offer comes to completion, a check is in the mail to you. Your new customers have the offer in their email inbox and you get emailed a list of everyone who grabbed your special offer.
Many business owners worry that Groupon users are just cheap coupon chasers with no extra money to spend. Not so fast…average income is almost $70,000! This is an affluent audience that any business would be happy to have the chance to capture. It is also mainly single females that are college educated and heavy social media users on YouTube, Facebook, Foursquare and Twitter. What a highly attractive market from a business owner standpoint. Now you have a chance to make them a customer for life. This is an almost impossible demographic to reach. Traditional marketing methods like newspaper, radio or direct mail just aren’t comparing to social media marketing anymore.
Wow your Groupon visitors and the repeat business will add to your bottom line. Check out the small business resource site they have at http://www.grouponworks.com/ to learn more and set up your first promotion.