To make conversations more awkward, the hundreds of competitors that have followed the Gorilla into the jungle mean most people roll their eyes when you tell them you have your own discount marketing application.
Why would anyone want to jump into this crowded space? And what were the reasons we thought we were going to be different from all the "clones"?
The case for a better Group Buying Application:
If you're going to catch a race car that's been going 200 mph for the past two years, does it make sense to build the exact same car and chase after it down the road? If you're going to make this into a race you better build a rocket, or at least something with wings.
So far, competitors in this space have tried a few things. Here's what we've noticed about their mistakes:
- Super social without purpose. A few people have tried adding more social hooks into their group discount apps. Unfortunately, most people have only focused on sharing deal links across Facebook/Twitter/Email. People care about real connections. What you do to foster those connection matters! There's a huge vacuum between businesses being able to communicate with their customers and people understanding the value of their own social graphs.
- Operational overhead. Creating offices in every city, hiring employees as boots on the ground, and hand creating every deal are an operational black hole. Instead, think like Google. Is this how they grew Adwords? No. Yet, hundreds of thousands of businesses use them for creating their ad campaigns. Where individual businesses feel intimidated by using Google's self service advertising platform, ad agencies and other businesses have stepped up to help create advertising campaigns using Google's automated tools. The web is supposed to give you an office in every city - USE IT!
- Solving Problems. Believe it or not, the discount marketing space actually has some interesting problems that need to be solved. The strange thing is how many people keep ignoring these problems. Instead of turning your back on businesses (your customers), it makes sense to listen to them and create a better solution. For example, here's a link to a Salon/Spa blog called SpaBoom Blog. The comments are more informative that the actual article, but the primary issues most business owners have with Group Buying or Discount Marketing are:
- An inability to control the size of the Group Deal. Even low limits are in the hundreds - and even 200 vouchers for 50% off can make a business nervous. Will I go broke doing a deal like this? Kupoz asked a simple question: Why can't a business do deals for only 10 customers in their local area?
- A lack of help in up-selling. It's easy for those of us in the industry to say "Discount marketing is meant to bring you new customers and roll advertising costs, customer acquisition costs, and marketing all into a single campaign. It's the business's job to up-sell the customer to make the deal easier on the bottom line of the business". Why can't we help businesses with this up-sell process? Customers love deals, but they also love information. We shouldn't be afraid to communicate great additions to an already amazing deal.
- A need for Proper Analytics. Was this deal worth it? Analytics prove the value you provide! If you don't package analytics with your campaign it's a disservice to your business customer. They should see how many people discussed their deal - where was their business discussed? Facebook, Twitter, Email? How many times across each site? What insights can you provide them about the social graphs that their deal was shared across? Let the business communicate directly with their customers and fans. Analytics provide insight into the campaign they ran. The proper package of data and information is proof of the value of a discount marketing campaign. It represents part of the value in what was charged for the campaign. (Kupoz takes 50% of the voucher sales per deal)
The Kupoz Solution:
- Kupoz Automated Deal Creation System. We took a page from Adwords and made a simple online deal creation wizard. In fact, we're the only Discount Marketing app in the world that makes it easy for anyone to create a deal - anytime! No more waiting in line on the phone, or feeling forced to work under someone else's rules. It's your business and your deal! This also helps us avoid over-extending ourselves operationally. In turn, we can focus on giving better service to you - our customers. Kupoz can also create and manage your campaign for you, (call us: 650-450-4383) and we'll always help review to ensure your deal is the best it can be - but feel free to take an active role in the process. We want businesses to be happy. Kupoz is also the only Discount Marketing app that is open to Ad Agencies. Do you have a client that wants to do a major discount marketing deal? Do they want to run it in a single city, multiple cities, or go nationwide? No Problem. You can create and manage a discount marketing campaign - complete with full analytics - for your clients. We also give Ad Agencies the ability to customize our deal templates to better fit their client's brand.
- A uniquely caring connection. Kupoz puts its money where its mouth is. For every voucher purchased on Kupoz we give $3 back to our customers. They can keep the money and cash out after they've saved $30, or use what they've saved towards buying another voucher once they've saved $20. Every day we feature a single cause along with our two deals. Maybe that school in your neighborhood needs a new projector? If customers want they can easily donate their $3 cash back to the local cause. Together we can change the lives of people in our communities! Sharing deals across Facebook, Twitter, and Email now has a personal aspect to it.
- Easy Refunds. A lot of people promise a refund if customers are not happy, but we decided to take it to another level. Every voucher purchased on Kupoz comes with an "Instant Refund" button. There's no need to call us, leave messages, or send emails. Just click it and let us know what went wrong and we'll refund what you payed for your voucher. It's that simple.
- Kupoz Group Deals VS Neighborhood Deals. Our Group Deals are simple. Each deal comes with a Threshold. This is the minimum needed to be purchased before a voucher deal is "active". Once the threshold is reached everyone gets the deal. If the threshold is never reached nobody is charged for the deal. Sale quantities of these group deals can go into the hundreds or thousands. If you're a business that's afraid of being inundated, fear no more. Our Neighborhood Deals solve the volume problem. Kupoz Neighborhood Deals are meant for limited quantity vouchers. You can discount a service and offer it to only 10-100 customers. We keep this deal hyper-local. Only people in your business's immediate vicinity will see these limited vouchers and are more likely to visit your business again!
- Communicate with your customers and fans. Keep in touch and help up-sell further services. Kupoz makes it easy. Kupoz users can follow a business's public page as well as each other's pages. This provides a continuous feed of comments, reviews, and discussions that span Kupoz, Facebook, Twitter and soon Foursquare. The value in a business running a discount marketing deal on Kupoz extends years beyond their successful marketing campaign with us. Best of all, we provide businesses with all the tools to make managing and analyzing everything super simple!
- Kupoz Analytics. We're built by a band of data freaks. That's why Kupoz provides businesses with a detailed report on how many times their deal was discussed, reviewed and shared - as well as provide unique ad campaign insights that no other company provides. All of this is included in the cost of our service.
- Fraud Protection. Kupoz provides a simple area where a business can easily verify if a voucher is valid or not. No need to program a POS system if you don't want to. Use any web or mobile phone to quickly enter a voucher code and make sure duplicates can't be accepted at multiple locations.
So - Why did we enter this market? Because we just built a rocket - and we're going to be the best Discount Marketing company out there. Period.
