At Daily Deal Builder, we’ve set up deal sites for lots of clients in all sorts of industries. Today, I’d like to discuss the Boutique space and how the deal industry can help benefit boutiques all over the planet.
I recently did a post on franchises, and boutiques can take advantage of those same ideas in terms of collecting email addresses and sending out their own deals.
I know what you might be thinking now, “A boutique/business which uses a platform to distribute their own deal is shooting themselves in the foot because they’re only sending the offer to their existing customers.”
That cause for concern is very real, and a good point…
My view is this, however… If done properly, a boutique can grow their online userbase, and have it not be a subscriber base filled existing customers — but rather potential customers. The primary goal is not to just grow and acquire a list of folks that already love the business, but rather grow and acquire a list of folks that should love the business and will love the business after they visit, deal with the superb customer service, and make a purchase.
Businesses have been offering promotions to their current subscribers / customers for a long, long time, well before the “deal industry” or even eCommerce came in the picture. If strategic marketing efforts are put forth, a business can start to not have to rely on another site to bring new blood in, but rather their own ingenious marketing efforts and platforms available online.
A boutique is a unique little shop with customers mainly within their local community, and then also, depending on their marketing, amongst similar minded online communities. Opening a deal site has the potential to increase the market reach of a boutique. It can help them reach new customers farther away from their location, and also reach new customers whose interests are closely aligned to what the boutique offers… the ‘deal’ pushes people over the edge and turns a moderately interested potential buyer, into a rabid deal finding machine.
A boutique also can sometimes run into excess inventory which they typically do huge blow out sales at the ends of seasons.
Setting up a deal site can change that. A shop owner can more minutely manage their inventory. If they have an extra 20 pairs of pants that need to get sold midway through the season, they can put these on the deal site for a percentage off. Also, if they have one extra pair of pants, they can put it up on their deal site for a discount and sell just that one, which will probably sell pretty quickly because of the extreme limited quantity. It is also worth noting that a boutique would not be required to have deals running 24 hours a day. They could simply run the same amount of deals that they may already offer, but do it online.
