These “Daily-Deals” group buying sites are continuing to exponentially grow at an alarming rate around the globe. They’re evolving right before our eyes as an excellent alternate marketing method for merchants and for media publishers.
But rather than participating with the larger established sites such as LivingSocial or Groupon, if you have web marketing or online publishing resources, you can just launch your very own branded daily deals site. It’s possible through the various “white-label” software programs which are available.
Since the blueprint for these daily-deal sites has already been established and are set in place, it’s just a matter of fine tuning and participating. These offers are able to engage a targeted audience who has money to spend and match them up with pre-established advertisers.
All that the web marketer who’s wanting to set up their own group buying program needs is the proper technology to get started. These daily deal sites have the potential of creating a new revenue stream for any business.
If you take a look at the already established bigger budget, high profile consumer daily deal sites, they have invested millions of investor dollars in building and maintaining their subscription base, so developing your own, using the same platform is a good alternative.
Groupon Collecting Consumers
In the first quarter of this year alone, Groupon has reportedly spent close to $200 million, just to acquire new customers for their database.
Since all that they’re doing is just collecting email registrants, who are merely consumers without really no targeted product or content in mind, what these large group-buying companies are basically doing is just gathering humongous numbers of generic transient bargain seekers who are looking for a good deal on anything. Not very targeted at all.
In fact, according to the latest research, just over 30% percent of the Groupon customers actually spent beyond the daily deal value itself, while just 22% percent indicated that they went back to the merchant to pay full price on another product.
So ultimately, these large daily deal sites simply do not currently provide enough repeat business for the participating merchant. Their promotions are not sustaining enough of a return in the long run for many.
Local Group Buying Deals Shows Better Results
On the flip side however, the majority of the laser focused local as well as specific niche media publishers are able to offer their merchants a finely tuned and hungry consumer audience.
These consumer subscribers of these smaller, usually localized daily deal programs are able to offer quality targeted results which are more likely to generate return business. These are specific niche targets such as, food and beverage, beauty and diet, local cultural events etc.
Also, since these smaller sites have experience as well as specialized expertise, subscribers will ultimately trust the “daily deals” publisher a lot more to feature the best possible deals of their products or services.
These are the exact customers which the participating merchants are wanting to attract. This is obviously because they are the type of buyers who’ll most likely return back to their business and pay full price in the future.
So statistically, the smaller local daily deals publishers who are offering deals in context, using a white-label solution, brings in an average return per each email subscriber of up to $1.00. Groupon, the largest and the most generic group buying service, in comparison, is at around $0.20 per email subscriber.
Better Overall Specialized Service
Although these large sites may have millions of email subscribers, it’s the targeted smaller publishers where the audiences buy from, and more importantly, they become repeat customers.
The specialized local niche publishers will also provide more value and better service to the merchants as well, as the “white-label” programs offer far better options for the publishers.
When this is executed well, these programs will reinforce better brand loyalty from their audience, while providing additional options for advertisers by offering new revenue streams for the daily deals publishers.
This can be especially beneficial for say a large local established retailer who already has an advantage because of their dedicated email base. All they need to do is just connect them with a daily deals program and just send out their deals.
By partnering with a daily deals software solution, these companies can then quickly launched their own branded group buying programs in selected markets.
Within weeks of a launch, it’s possible to expand to different products and markets. So using these deals platforms, opens up the flexibility to be able to build offers which are a better fit for your overall brand, tied together with the content and theme of your site.
White Label Daily-Deals Solutions
These white label daily deals programs which are specific to your site or products can also at times offer a team of graphic designers, copywriters, production staff, scheduling, accounts payable and customer service in their package.
They will also handle all of the tedious details of the daily deals process, so you can just do what you do best, which is creating content or providing products for your website or store.
With an already established and loyal audience base along with your reputable merchant status, these participants of the group buying programs are seeing profits as well as better brand loyalty because of the integration of their own daily deals offers.
Groupon has been the pioneer of this marketing segment, but these publishers are in an excellent position to be able to take the daily deal method to the next level.