New Local Daily Deals for Small Business

By now everyone has heard of, and probably used,  Groupon, Living Social, or one of the many sites like them.  These sites all work along the same premise, they just go about it slightly differently. They offer customers the chance to purchase one significant deal each day.  This allows the business to attract a large number of new customers and, hopefully, earn their continued business. 

Daily deals have worked well for many businesses, but problems have been seen as well.  For instance, many small business owners find it difficult to offer the large discounts that is required to utilize these coupon services. Also, with the huge quantity of deals being offered, many business owners believe customers go where the next coupon sends them rather than convert to a repeat customer.  Again, this is especially difficult for a small business.

A new coupon based marketing company thinks it has the answer for small business.  Constant Contact, a company used by approximately half a million small businesses to manage and create email marketing campaigns, has recently launched SaveLocal.  Rather than model the marketing campaign on large scale consumer lists, Save Local targets your existing customers and offers incentives to share coupons with their social networks. In addition, the merchant controls the amount of discount offered to ensure they do not lose money and Save Local only charges $1 to $3 per coupon.

So what's in this for your existing customers? That is up to the merchant.  Some examples are an extra discount on the coupon, a percent off a future visit, or even a free item.  The biggest plus is that the customer gets the incentive just for sharing!  Your existing customer is thanked, by earning the incentive, simply for sharing the coupon whether or not any of their friends make a purchase.

Targeting your existing customers social networks increases the chance that the person seeing your coupon is local to your business and therefore more likely to use it.  SaveLocal states that approximately 1/5 of the people responding to the deals are new customers for the merchant.  Being local customers, they are more likely to be become repeat customers.


National Business Capital is always on the lookout for services which may benefit our customers. SaveLocal may be a good marketing option for small businesses to reach local customers.   Take a look if you think daily deal marketing might work for you.