8 Essential Tips For A Successful Groupon Promotion ….

The online world is awash with cut price offer sites and if you are not very careful your morning inbox can be flooded with lots of tempting cut price deals.

I am a huge fan of these and confess to have done much of my Christmas shopping using these great deals.

However, I also have experience of being a 'seller' using Groupon and after the reports in daily newspapers over the last 2 or 3 weeks I have decided to share a few helpful hints and tips with you just in case you too were considering running an offer yourselves.

• Groupon is NOT looking to take over your entire business capacity.  They look for the slack in your system so you need to know how many spare appointments you have on average per week/month or you need to know how many extra units you can produce without a great deal more expense/effort being required.  Groupon then simply multiply this weekly average by the number of weeks the offer is to run to get a total number of units to be sold.  Make sure you do not over estimate!

• Do not give over all your appointments to servicing these cut price ones.  Your full price customers have to come first as they are paying you and your bills.  if you had 10 spare appointments per week for Groupon then allocate 10 appointments per week and people will have to wait until an appointment is free.  Do not allow it to take over your life!

• Do not offer treatments that are expensive to do and use a lot of expensive products or do not offer very expensive products that you would make a huge loss on.  I offer Reflexology as the only equipment/product required is wipes and foot cream and my time.

• If Groupon oversell on your agreed number of vouchers then this is not your fault, but make sure you agree to a number at the start.

• Groupon will give you 50% of the offer price (the offer price is very very cut price from full price), and they recommend the offer price.  You will also have to pay VAT so you get less than 50% – so try and negotiate a slightly higher percentage than 50%. Bear in mind also that you only get paid when the customer rings to redeem the voucher, and believe you me there are a lot who do not do this and so in this case you get nothing and Groupon keeps it all.

• When a client/customer rings to either book the appointment or order the item get their codes immediately and redeem them online immediately.  Get the payment before they arrive for their appointment as Groupon pay you very quickly.  This way if they do not turn up or cancel within the time you ask you have been paid.

• Be very firm about any terms and conditions at the time of booking.  If you are a salon and have a 24 hour cancellation or change of appointment policy then make this clear at the time of booking – it is amazing how many clients think it is acceptable to simply not turn up and then expect to be able to rebook for a later date.

• Use the cut price offer to upsell other products.  If for instance the offer was for a Facial then when they call to book then offer a luxury Facial for £xx or a manicure added on for £xx.  Make sure you get email/phone numbers and put them onto a mailing list for future offers.  Give them a discount code for their next treatment.

When used correctly Groupon can be an excellent marketing tool.  When not used correctly Groupon can be a nightmare.

I would love to hear any good/bad experiences you have had using these sites …..so leave me some comments below