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We’re Just Gettin’ Started: Daily Deal Offers in 2012
By Charles Martin | January 6, 2012
All the news about daily deal merchants pulling back in 2012 is wishful thinking on the part of the merchant. Of course, when I wake up on January 1, I always put together that dream list chock full of long and distant runs, a few marathons (I have and will complete a few this year), breaking habits, and other such resolution fare. But I know come August, I’m still thinking about how to make a lot of it happen. Life is life. Merchants can’t predict how sales will be this year, but a lot would like to imagine that the daily deal marketing they did in 2011 that probably DID bring in repeat customers, will be something they can forgo this year.
That’s not reality. And we’re still one of the best solutions to hyper-local marketing around.
The many merchants that email or call me daily to re-run and even offer their services as free testimonial stars never hits the headlines.
The truth is the daily deal space is just getting started. Last year was possibly our first real year. My company, LivingSocial, doubled or possibly tripled it’s work force. We tried a lot of great ideas. Some are still in play. Others not. More are on the way. We know what to keep. We know what we should stick with.
The good news is that while the press wants to put the last word on our eulogy, we are just like any 2 year old company. We’re just gettin’ started.
The other good news that often gets lost in the static is that, unlike a lot of our competitors, we are aware of the need for more and more of what I call “merchant love”. In fact, we just hired a specific person to run merchant love and he comes from the top of a few great companies. I, like the other hundreds of LivingSocial sales folks on the streets of America, Canada, and many foreign environs, work hard to make sure we find what works and what doesn’t. We get involved at the micro level. We worry about the future of what I’ve recognized as the backbone of our economy. We worry about you Mr. and Mrs. Merchant and it isn’t fair to say that we haven’t worked hard to bring you the customers that mean long-term dollars to your business.
After all, it would be foolish for us to run amok on Main Street and load a bunch of one-offs that will ultimately spell ruin for our mutual businesses. The very reason you have trusted us with your future customers is that we have a mutual win-win. If you do well, we do well. You’ll tell your friends. More deals get run. Merchants welcome new and engaged customers. And so the story goes.
Every single day I work through many deals that are vetted, looked at, vetted, and then looked at again by a crack team of traffic specialists that are very strict about quality. If your company isn’t really showing a good face on the web or if your customer happy factor is low or non-existent, we will ask to work together at another time. We want to know people like what you do. As per usual, the deals we DON’T do never get into the news stream. I’m selling 30+ deals a month. Probably 25% of that number doesn’t even see the light of day.
Sure, there are deals that might have been disastrous. If you read the new bio on Steve Jobs, you’ll find (or maybe even remember) that many of Apple’s first computers were real expensive disasters. No bulk refunds were given. We stuck with Jobs for three decades and now Apple’s product is the supreme choice. We try to avoid disastrous. What part of “we’re just gettin’ started” is not clear?
I work for a company like Apple. I wake every day knowing that the captain up in the tower is probably not sleeping as much and is worrying much more than I about how to make it all work. I can guarantee you that the solution for tracking and making it easier for people to repeat their visits to your business is on the horizon. We understand that it’s the mother lode. They don’t share these ideas with me, but I know we’re on this track because of the type of company I work for.
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