Although Groupon and other daily-deal sites have cropped up rapidly in recent years, it may be helpful to analyze your business thoroughly before taking on a tasks that may involve more expenditure than you were prepared for.

On a very basic level, if you are a numbers person, you have very little work to do to determine how much financial loss your business may take on offering a daily-deal, in order to gain marketing leverage. Coupon sales of any kind are a source of loss in the areas of product and productivity. In order to prevent a daily-deal marketing attempt from collapsing, the vital infrastructure of your business must be protected.

Protect Your Daily-Deal Investment

The only way to protect your marketing investment in a daily-deal site is to be thoroughly prepared for all scenarios. If your organization cannot handle the extra costs of hiring temporary workers to meet possible influxes of customers, or purchasing an increased product supply, it may be a better idea to wait until it can.

Be Prepared for Mass Customers

Although you may not receive them, you do need to be prepared for a largely increased number of customers. Commonly, you can expect that the more smokin’ the deal, the more customers will come. Part of your marketing team’s management plan should include a lot of calculating about what the business can offer in the coupon department, without marching out the red line.

Be Prepared to Lose Money

The best way to be prepared to lose money, is to have extra money. If your company does not have extra money, this is not the best method of advertising for you at this time. Start smaller. Once your profit reaches well over your costs, try again. Try to realize that doing a daily-deal, is a marketing strategy, not one that should be used to increase profits on a small business level.

Hold Onto Those Customers

Once you have achieved the overhead to run a daily-deal marketing campaign, the ones that do arrive and take advantage of your coupon deal, should be highly valued, and they should know so. Prepare a coupon deal of your own, even if on printed computer paper, that rewards those who took advantage of your first deal, and encourages them to come again. Without nurturing those relationships, your daily-deal campaign can just become a shot-in-the-dark marketing strategy that will leave a business with little more, if anything, then exactly what they started with.

Online Presence

These days there are almost no legitimate excuses for a business that does not have some kind of online presence. When you do run across the rare person that has not been on the internet, you look at them with something akin to the same look DVD player owners would now look at the owner of a Beta Max.

Although this may be a frustrating fact for some, others know that when they are looking for a bargain, the internet is the first place to look. Be sure your business has a site, no matter how small or insignificant to link to your daily-deal offer. If you have zero web presence, you can change that by setting up a free site on the hundreds of available options, and post your businesses physical contact information in the very least.

Be Aware of the Daily-Deal Terms of Service

Be aware of all elements of your contractual deal with the daily-deal site. Read the small print before you sign on the bottom line, check for hidden cost and fees, and always be sure to set your daily-deal coupon limit at a rate in which if every allowable one is purchased, it won’t put your business in the red.

Sources:

• Will Groupon Boost Your Small Business?
• When Groupon is Bad for Your Business (And Mine)
• Does Groupon Erode Price?