Both the couponing and the deals’ industries have been receiving a tremendous amount of attention lately. Groupon’s IPO, obviously, has added to this hype as well as the fact that Coupons.com recently received $200 million from investors.
The popularity of both of these types of services indicate that consumers want deals and coupons. Everyone likes to save, and now that people have had a taste of some great savings, they will likely come to expect it in the future.
Have you come to depend on coupons and daily deals? Let us know.
These services have created an entirely new advertising model for businesses to utilize. As a result, traditional advertising, such as with newspapers, is becoming much less relevant for brands. In a report from Forbes, the redemption rate of coupons in newspapers is only 0.6 percent.
According to Vijay Pullur, the CEO of social couponing service SocialTwist, brands can’t target consumers effectively in print advertising. Digitally speaking, brands are better able to target since users can click on their preferences, but he believes that there is a better way to target.
He is proposing a new form of targeting through a platform called Tell-a-Friend that involves social sharing. While it is true that users can share daily deals and coupons through social sites like Groupon, SocialTwist allows users to share in order to receive a better bargain. For instance, a user could turn a $1 coupon into a $3 coupon if he shares it with 3 other people.
Pullur tells us that brand engagement is much higher with this model since marketers can target a specific segment and message. For example, a mom would likely take a Huggies coupon and share it with other moms that would need it. The benefits are two-sided in this case, because the mom is able to save more, and Huggies was able to reach a particular fragment of its market.
“The targeting that the social coupons provide is tremendously better than any other mechanism because it goes through sort of a human filtering,” said Pullur.
He went on to say that SocialTwist’s social coupons receive a 50-80 percent redemption rate as well.
It is a bit surprising that this idea hasn’t yet taken off with daily deals or other popular couponing sites, but, chances are, it’s coming.
