We take our online marketing seriously here at Clear the Air. We recognize the web is where people go to find local services and we try to keep up with all the latest trends and developments in the online marketing space, particularly those pertaining to localized marketing. Lately we’ve been looking very closely at the “group offers” concept made popular by Groupon and Living Social, as well as the dozens of clones in the Houston area (they keep popping up in our twitter stream).
Group deals are an interesting concept but they carry a fair bit of risk for the merchant. Not only must we very heavily discount our offer in the hopes that some of those new customers become repeat customers, the remainder left over is then shared with the group deal provider, usually to the tune of half. That leaves us with only 25% which becomes a pretty heavy loss while fingers are crossed it works out in the long term.
We’ve read some of the horror stories, as well as some of the successes by merchants that have tried group deals. We’ve been tempted but, boy oh boy, some of those risks are just too risky.
How then could we make a group offer while controlling some of that risk? *light bulb, eureka moment* Let’s just run it ourselves on our own website! Cut out the middle man as it were. So that’s what we did! You can see our group deal offer here;
50% Off Furnace Check Up Service – Houston Metro
Our Group Deal – Just in Time for Heating Season
Admittedly we do not have the built in reach that Groupon or Living Social have with their massive user base and email list, but we can build our own reach, and maybe just enough to make the offer a success. Between social networking through Twitter and Facebook, pay-per-click advertising on Google and Facebook, this blog post, existing search engine traffic to our website, etc… we hope to get just enough reach to pull it off.
So, if you’re in the Houston Metro area and need your gas furnace serviced to ensure it’s running safely and at peak efficiency for this winter, you should take us up on our offer. If you’re interested in how we make out with rolling out our own group deal, make sure to check back as we’ll write another post in our blog about how it went.
That is really cool… what kind of technology did you use to enable you to run the deal on your site? Did you use an application/service, do you have developers, did it cost a lot? I’d say this would be a much better trend for merchants, to deploy your own deals, but wonder how many have the ability to do it, what the easiest way is etc.
Charles