Why not DIY your own daily deals?

You’ve got to hand it to many entrepreneurs. They have the knack of taking something extraordinarily simple and monetising it before the rest of us can say, “I could have thought of that’.

Take the latest online flavour of the month, deal engines, as made famous by Cudo, Spreet, Groupon, Catch of the Day et al. Using technology which has been around for several years (email broadcasting with a sprinkle of social networking), they have simply aggregated a good list of recipients to create the number of orders that allow products and services to be offered at a significant discount.

Blend them all together, stir and hey presto – a wonderful new business is created that advertisers are queuing up to be part of.

Baking fortune cookies

If you hadn’t heard, a founder of one deal engine, Andrew Mason of Groupon, recently knocked back Google’s offer of a reported $6 billion to buy him out.

While it would take a significant investment to replicate the sophistication of the technology and reach these large player possess, you can still achieve impressive results by using your list and your email broadcast technology or service to your advantage.

All you need is a few quite simple ingredients to cook up a storm of viral promotion.

Ingredients for deal success

The first thing to do is decide on your strategy. Do you want to provide a loss leader to get customers in ‘the door’, or perhaps move some stock that presently isn’t going anywhere? Perhaps you just want to promote your business using the ‘viral’ techniques these deal engines rely on.

The next thing you need is a list. If your own is not sufficient, you could buy some space on the email list of an appropriate website or web publisher. Don’t forget the numbers that social networking can achieve as well. Perhaps you could get together with some friendly and non-competitive businesses to place deals on each other’s lists.

Finally you need a deal or offer. Make the offer as compelling as possible. The equation here is pretty straightforward. The better the offer the better the viral effects for obvious reasons. Recipients will soon ‘tell’ their friends if the offer is good enough.

The deal engines work on a volume basis, with many offers only activating when a certain number of deals are ordered. But there are variations on this, such as a time based offer or number limited offer – ie. the first five get the offer and so on.

Once you have these ducks lined up, broadcast your email offer, whack it on your website and social network it as hard as you can.

Gourmet results for chicken feed

Of course, the wonderful thing about this approach is that it costs next to nothing. If you already can broadcast email, it’s really only some graphics and your time that need cost anything.

And this affordability means that you can happily trial and error until you come up with an offer and/or formula that works for you.

But an important word of warning. Unless your list has agreed to receive offers like that you are planning, you will soon fall foul of them, the Spam Act authorities or even both.

So ensure your list has ‘opted in’ to the kind of offers you are considering sending.

But really, the deal recipe is not difficult to cook up. Why not try out a few and see how you go?

Have you enjoyed the results of a deal campaign? Tell us about it by commenting below.

In addition to being a leading eBusiness educator to the smaller business sector, Craig Reardon is the founder and director of independent web services firm The E Team which was established to address the special website and web marketing needs of SMEs in Melbourne and beyond.