Franchise Deals

I recently did a post on online franchising and decided to expand on that a little bit and also take a different angle.

Let’s discuss how existing brick and mortar stores can take advantage of the deal industry.

Today let’s look at restaurants, boutiques or fast food chains… We’ve all been in a restaurant and see one of those “leave your business card” bowls to win some prize or another.  Well, companies doing this are ahead of the curve, because what they’re doing is not just offering a prize to someone, they are collecting email addresses, and with those addresses they can follow up and most importantly, give the customers a reason to come back.

Now what some of these companies are doing is sending, say, weekly emails to their subscriber base (adding in the new email addresses in the biz card bowl each week, of course) with a coupon or a discount or maybe to alert subscribers of entertainment they will have, specials and promotions they are running, etc.  But what they’re missing out on is a way to gather more email addresses and grow their list without relying on the business card bowl or strange piece of paper at the checkout that requests email addresses.

So let’s assume a restaurant wants to get involved in the deal industry, but they can’t afford to offer a discount on their services as well as pay a deal site a large percentage (often times around 50%).  First off, we say ‘great move!’  So what they do is either build a platform from scratch or use a pre-built platform, import their current subscriber base to the site, and start creating offers… and these can be the exact same offers they’ve been emailing out previously.

But the magic here is that let’s say Bob gets the new offer email from the restaurant, and says “hey, this is a great deal and I should share it with my friend George.” So instead of just forwarding the email to George as he would have previously, Bob shares the link to the deal on George’s Facebook page.  George sees the link, clicks on it, likes the deal and gets it too.  To get the deal, however, George had to give the restaurant his email address.  Now, 3 of George’s friends on Facebook also saw the post and they went and got the deal too. We live in a very socially connected world and social media sites have a “love affair” with daily deal sites.

So now the restaurant has 4 extra email addresses in the subscriber base and customer acquisition costs have dropped a bit.  Here at Daily Deal Builder, we have been receiving more and more interest from merchants who have run a daily deal in the past, but realize that technology exists to enable them to run their own promotions without dishing out 50% or more of the revenue.