loyalty

The Long Tail Issue for Daily Deal Sites

When daily deal sites like Living Social and Groupon came to the market, many observers looked at it as another nail in the coffin for offline retailing.

By bringing huge discounts to consumers via their local business partners, Groupon and others like them would show business a new way to make more money, while bringing more customers to them.

Except it’s not quite worked out that way yet.

Short Term Gain, Long Tail Miss

The problem with daily deals sites – and, to be fair, any of the stack-em-high-sell-em-cheap options that many businesses look at – is that they’re not really set up for long-term loyalty. And that’s a key reason why so many businesses fail in general, and something that many daily deal partners are complaining about.

Sure, they’ll give customers a nice discount and a reason to come to your store or business in the first place. But where’s the incentive to come back if I’m a new customer, once I’ve taken advantage of your sale product?

Unless there’s a relationship sale versus a transactional one, if I don’t normally shop with you then I have no real reason to come back unless it’s for another daily deal. Which sees you lowering your profit margin to make the offer in the first place – not ideal.

Business and Consumer Apathy

It would appear that more folks from both sides of the fence are beginning to think like that, too. According to a new survey from Cooper Murphy in the U.K., a whopping 82% of businesses surveyed that have run campaigns on Groupon were unsatisfied with the amount of repeat business it brought.

Add these figures to a study by Rice University in May of this year, that reported just over 20% of daily deals customers become repeat customers, and you can see why the daily deals market is one that seems to divide opinion on its benefits.

It’s not just the business owners that are suffering. Because one of the major premises of daily deals is to attract the low-spend customer, restaurant and bar staff have found that customers using a daily deal offer will usually tip less than those paying full price. Ironically, the less you have to pay, the less the tip should be too, it would seem.

So what’s the answer?

Loyalty and Long Term Gain

Everyone likes a bargain. I do; you probably do; I know my wife does. It’s human nature – if we can pay less, we will (although paying more for extra quality isn’t a bad thing).

The problem with constant bargains is that customers get into the mindset that they’ll only wait for these bargains, and ignore you the rest of the time. Get ignored by customers and… well, you don’t need to be a rocket scientist to know the outcome of that scenario.

So while the short-term benefit is clear, businesses need to be building long-term benefits for the customers, to encourage return visits and loyalty.

Episodic discounts. Say a daily deal saves you 60% on the transaction. Instead of the one-off approach, offer three transactions saving 20% each time. On subsequent visits or purchases, have an amazing add-on deal that encourages further spend on top of the discount.

Split the location. If you’re an offline business, with multiple locations, why not split the offer between different locations on different days? A sports shop could offer different goods on different days of the week at different stores; a restaurant a different appetizer based on location; a movie theatre group, a different 2-for-1 admission to a different movie across town.

Promote loyalty. If you don’t already have one, build a loyalty card around your daily deals customers. The first time they come in, have them fill out a short form with their information, and then give a loyalty card with unique offers based around the daily deal. Use it X amount of times and they receive a free product or service (within a certain budget).

The beauty with the loyalty approach is that you can now tailor email and mobile campaigns to your customers (opt-in, obviously) that offers more call-to-action specials just for them.

Run that alongside any specials you offer existing customers, and you’re encouraging growth and repeat custom across the board.?Which seems to be all that businesses and consumers of daily deal sites want, anyway.

Worth a shot, no?

image: jakelevine

Community, Loyalty and the Power of Give

Last night on Twitter, I was part of the?#sbt10 chat, part of the Start Blogging Today project (disclosure – I’m a partner in the project). As usual, there were a ton of great topics discussed on how to make your blog work better for you.

One of the conversations that arose was how to reward loyalty – i.e., how to make sure that your blog community knows you appreciate them.

Michael Schechter asked how you’d go about that, and I suggested exclusive content as one option (similar to what I did with my free Facebook marketing ebook).

Of course, that approach on a blog would mean that to really benefit from exclusive content, your readers/community would have to be subscribed to a newsletter or email subscription. Which would then negate the rest of your readers that don’t subscribe this way, but still show loyalty by coming back time and again.

So what ways could you reward on your blog, for both subscribers and everyday visitors/readers?

Loving Your Blog Community

Face it, without a community a blog is nothing more than a broadcast platform. Your community nurtures the growth of your blog; it helps share with others; it defends if needed; and it keeps you growing as a blogger by sharing great insights in the comments.

It doesn’t matter if it’s a personal blog or more business-oriented – community is the real king (sorry, content lovers). For business blogs, community is the relationship to the sale – look after it and look after your business.

So what are some of the ways to reward a loyal blog community?

Exclusive Content

As I mentioned earlier in the post, this would normally be via a newsletter or email subscription, so may negate some of your readers (although it’s a great way to build an even more loyal community on subscription too). Some of the things you could offer could be:

A free ebook;
White papers;
Solid business advice not normally seen on your blog;
Discounted offers on affiliate programs.

There’s a lot you can make exclusive to really say “thanks for being part of my community”. You’ll have a better idea of what would appeal to yours – all you need to do is put that into action.

The Freemium Model

Because exclusive content needs an exclusive outlet to really make it work, you run the risk of excluding the readers that visit every day, comment and are as just as important a part of your community as subscribers.

So how do you make sure that you’re not ignoring them and focusing on your exclusive content?

Episodic content. This can work in two ways. You can either write a series of educational posts on topics your readers would find useful, or you can offer the first chapter of any ebooks that exclusive content subscribers receive. That way, “normal readers” still receive value and can decide whether to expand into the subscription option.
Actionable content. Want to be seen as a thought leader or serious blogger in your space? Then offer action points that anyone visiting your blog can take away and make work for them.?John Haydon does this all the time for Facebook strategies, while CopyBlogger offers solid tips on writing for search engines. Help others; help you.
Highlight your community. Another way to reward your community is to give them some reader love. By coming to your blog every day and commenting or sharing you, your community is helping you grow awareness of you. So do the same for them. Have them guest post on your blog, or post about someone from your community frequently. We all like to feel appreciated; make sure your blog community knows you appreciate them.

Protecting Your Community

Growing your blog community is the first part; but it doesn’t stop there. Just as your community nurtures you and helps you, so you need to do the same in return, but take it to an extra level – by protecting them.

Think about it – if someone’s taking the time out of their life and schedule to read and share their thoughts on your blog, the very least you should be doing is making sure it’s somewhere that they want to hang out, and feel comfortable doing so.

Make it clear you won’t tolerate abuse to your community. One of the best things about any blog is the comments section – so many great thoughts and ideas can come from here, and new friendships can be made. So making it a safe haven is paramount – protect your commenters, protect your blog.
Have a comment policy. Currently I don’t have one, purely because I’ve been really fortunate in having commenters who pretty much respect each other’s point of view. But it’s an idea I’m thinking of, and it can help you set both guidelines for new visitors, as well as assure your current community you have their best interests at heart.?Ari Herzog has an excellent example of how a blog comment policy could look.

These are just some examples of how you can use your blog to reward the people that make it what it is. There are a ton of other things you could do (and we discuss a bunch of them over in the Start Blogging Today forums).

You could use some of them; you could use all of them – the main thing is you’re at least doing something to reward your blog community.

After all, they reward you just by stopping by each time – thanking and looking after them is the least you can do, no?

photo credit:?jammcm
photo credit:?Kelly Schott

Social Media Easter Eggs

How are you offering value to your customers? How is your business doing it differently from your competitors and peers?

Are you taking their service and adding a slight twist to it, or are you thinking of ways to separate you from the many other similar approaches that others are using?

“Customers” doesn’t necessarily need to refer to people paying for your services, either. Customers could be readers of your blog; or connections on Twitter; or watchers of your YouTube videos.

While they may not pay you hard cash for your “service” (blog, tweets, videos, etc), they are investing their time in you; time that could be spent elsewhere.

So how are you rewarding that? Are you? How about Easter Eggs as rewards (as in the virtual hidden message version)?

Some of the ideas I’ve been thinking of I’ll be putting into play very soon. For example, if you’re connected to me via my Facebook Page, you’ll receive something in the next 5-7 days that’s tied into Facebook and won’t be available elsewhere. Sure, someone may share it after it’s public, but until (or if) that happens, you’ll only get that something on Facebook.

Or Twitter. One of the ways that I want to use Twitter more is by time-stamping a tweet, where there’ll be a surprise for the first X amount of people to click through to a link and download area for a limited edition Twitter ebook, or similar.

Or this blog. I’m in the process of a “relaunch”, if you like, with a new design and a newsletter, just to kick things off. If you subscribe to the newsletter, occasionally I’ll pick a subscriber and send something really cool their way that’s tied into the topics we talk about in the newsletter.

The same goes with the SRM Group – we’ll be looking at ways to reward social responsibility, whether that’s on Facebook or any other social outpost.

These are just some simple, basic ways to use Easter Eggs in social media, to say thank you for your support. Hopefully each one will be beneficial, because it’ll be tied into the platform in question.

Now, imagine if you turned that over to your business to your most loyal customers? It could be offline or online – it depends where you have a bigger presence.

Instead of giving 10% off your latest product or a two-for-one offer, why not give something your customer really wants? After all, anyone can give a discount but only those that care give a benefit.

Accessories that you’d normally use as an add-on sale – can you take a hit and give them as part of the overall sale?
Guidebooks for cars – can your garage/service centre give them away to a customer for their first service?
A milestone order from a customer or supplier – can you give them a relevant partner product as well as the ordered one?

Every action you take to thank loyalty has a core reaction of extra loyalty. Get extra loyalty – well, the sky’s the limit then.

Yes?

photo credit: enough