Online tips to increases festive season sales

Worldwide, businesses are using online daily deal websites to promote their businesses and offerings. Daily deal sites, such as Groupon, specialise in marketing products or services to a database of registered users are growing in popularity as a marketing tool.

"This concept helps merchants to drive new customers through the door. It is a joint venture with all our partners to make sure customers have a great experience. A satisfied customer will tell their friends about their experience and spread the word on social media platforms and potentially become loyal customers thereafter," says Groupon CEO, Wayne Gosling.

10 Groupon tips

1. Timing - If this business is a nail technician or a beauty salon and peak season are weddings, be sure to staff up and plan accordingly. Otherwise, regular clients will become annoyed and staff overworked.
   
2. Planning - Be prepared and brief your team to manage an influx of phone calls for the first week a deal goes live. Customers want to book their appointments, so be prepared that your phone will be ringing off the hook.
   
3. Pricing - Sometimes companies try to sell something at a higher price to reduce later to the normal price during a promotion. Rather stick to the original price at all times.
   
4. T&Cs - The worst customer experience is to show up and find out that a deal is off or not valid on a weekend. Never hide important information in the fine print it will just annoy customers.
   
5. Be realistic - If the business is a tyre store and you know that each car needs 30 minutes per fitting, adjust the deal for this time.
   
6. Up sell - Structure your deal for the business to sell more services or products to the customers when they come through the door. Grab this opportunity.
   
7. Social media - Surprisingly many people reconnect with former customers through group buying deals. Take advantage and market your deal on Twitter, Facebook and other social media platforms.
   
8. Be strategic - One of the biggest challenges of owning a small business is to keep an even flow of customers for your staff to handle. If the customer flow is down between 2pm and 5pm, run your deal at that time to keep your staff busy.
   
9. Tracking - It is important to keep track of the amount of promotions sold and how much money your deal is generating. At Groupon, partners can login to a dashboard and see how business is performing in real time.
   
10. Location - No one will drive 10 km just to save R10. Keep distance in mind for your customers.
    

"We strive to have long term partnerships with merchants that will benefit the end customer in the long run. By following these simple guidelines, merchants can benefit even more from the festive season spending this year, even without owning a website," concludes Gosling.

For more information, go to www.GrouponWorks.com.