In our challenging consumer economy, one of the best strategies for success is the implementation of promotions and coupons. It is well known that many people will purchase more readily if there is a perceived savings to be had, and providing specials and limited time promotions/coupons can be a good option for many businesses. In this blog post I wanted to talk a little about some of the options that are often used and might be beneficial.
Firstly, there are the Daily Deals. My assumption is that you are familiar with these, but if not, these are websites that will email you with a deal/s that is specific to your location. Of these, Living Social and Groupon are two of the most popular options. The advantage of these is that there is a significant number of people who do use these services so these might bring you new customers.
Living Social
http://getfeatured.livingsocial.com/getfeatured/us
Groupon
https://www.grouponworks.com/
While neither require an up-front fee, the catch is that they require you pay them a significant share of the money made from the deal (or so I have read, I could not locate merchant pricing information), and they encourage you to offer deals in the 50% off range to ensure they’re more attractive to customers. So you’re discounting, then having to share in the profits.
Another common option are coupon websites. There are many of these, so it is important to ensure that your investment in time and money is spent only on the very best, and the most popular of these. From my research I noted different types of coupon websites, meaning that some are geared more toward restaurants, others popular retail, and while others are more broad so include diverse services. What is important here is that the one you choose provides local results, and is one that features your type of products/services.
The following popular options are of the more general variety.
RetailMeNot
https://www.retailmenot.com/static/advertise/
Sacramento Entertainment Book
http://www.entertainment-savings-offers.com/sacramento/book/
DealGator
http://www.dealgator.com/sacramento
https://dealgator.wufoo.com/forms/submit-a-site/
DealChicken
https://www.dealchicken.com/sacramento-ca
https://www.dealchicken.com/featurebusiness
CitySearch
https://sacramento.citysearch.com/deals
https://signup.citygrid.com/advertise_with_us
You may have noted “citysearch”, this is more of the yellow pages variety, but they do have coupons. In this regard, there are many directory type of websites which do allow you to add your own images. In this case, you could always include a featured image that is promotional (assuming there is no provision against this practice). In this case, most will require you to pay for a premium listing.
Another option that you may wish to consider is advertising on review websites, where possible, and the popular search engines.
Angie’s List – The Big Deal
https://my.angieslist.com/thebigdeal/welcome.aspx
Google Places
https://support.google.com/places/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=48187
Bing Business Portal
https://advertising.microsoft.com/small-business/getting-started/step-1
* Bing offers the ability to provide coupons/discounts in your free listing
Utilizing Social Media is another option that has become popular. If you use Twitter, you can tweet about a discount or promotion and provide a link to it on your website. For Facebook, you could install one of the Apps that provide this functionality (woobox.com is one popular option, though with a bit of searching you’ll find others) or you could have a coupon/graphic created, feature it on your Facebook page by “pinning to the top” and then providing a link to the page with the coupon.
There are scripts that can be purchased that will integrate within a website if your need is to provide multiple coupons with UPC barcodes or QR codes, etc. From my research the software associated with these can be rather expensive, and most are really geared toward people who want a coupon website, not a coupon inclusion. So my suggestion, if you do want a coupon or a just a few, then have it created graphically, and add your own code to it (if needed). This code can be easily created for free from a variety of websites, one I found was http://www.barcode-generator.org/
A coupon that I recently created
