While I’ve expressed my concerns on deal sites many times, I can’t help but wonder if the SMBs businesses buying into deals themselves are getting a free pass in the equation. Today I’m asking a simple question: After the deal gets signed and the customer influx starts up, are daily deal businesses doing anything to insure their own success or merely blaming their marketing partner for a bad deal?

When a customer self selects a business there’s an interest and a good experience may be enough for them to reselect, come back and build loyalty – motivation builds affinity. But when you offer 50% off, the bets are off, people are “discovering” but they’re not discovering new passions, they’re discovering deals and if they’re smart, hoping around in a 50% off world from experience to experience.

With few exceptions, the deal I see all share a common problem — there’s no basis for a relationship. Everything is a onetime purchases wrapped up in the justification that customers will “discover” something, fall in love with it and return time and time again. Businesses are buying into a long term customer model but not doing anything to get the customer back.

When a business complains about a daily deal we shouldn’t let them off on the excuse that the economics, sales people or backend payment sucked. Those are probably all true but more often than not, it wouldn’t make a bit of difference if they were good.

Instead we need to ask them where their program was to segment the non-tippers from the chatty customer raving about the wine. We need to ask why they’re giving 5 free ice creams at once instead of over 5 visits. Why is the climbing gym giving a one day lesson instead of a month long membership. Where’s the guest card to encourage a yelp review so others find the business? If there’s no hook, no loyalty building and no engagement it’s no wonder a hundred new customers aren’t all coming back.

The lesson from daily deals has been spelled out well: SMBs, stop believing in miracles and start creating your own. Whether it’s a coupon, a daily deal, a facebook page, tweets or any other hyped up marketing tactic it’s not about making people walk in the door, it’s about what you’re going to do when they step in to get them to come back.

I spent the better part of today flying around the country; 3 flights, something like 6,000 miles, 7 free sodas and a whole lot of pretzel packs (and of course the first leg was the only one with a power adapter in the sat… but I digress). In any event, something struck me on these flights; if at 35,000 feet airlines are promoting their web & mobile offerings, where else are there opportunities to promote ours that we’re missing now because they feel “offline”?
Before I dive into that question, let me briefly walk through the two examples to get you a sense of what I mean and offer up some very distinct promotion campaigns that are being run over the same campaign.
My first flight was a short hop from La Guardia to Boston on US Airways and prompted this post when my beverage arrived. I’ve probably had thousands of drinks on airlines and often notice the napkins but only today did it really hit me. Printed on their napkin was a simple promotion – send a text message with your name, email and a few other details and they’d enroll you in the program and spit back a confirmation text with your mileage number. Talk about a great use of the latest technology. No need to go home, no need to be online. No need to leave the airport. Just fire up the pda or basic phone and shoot off a text and you’re set. Quick, easy and so simple that while US Airways isn’t someone I fly with often, it was just too easy to pass up. So now I’m a member.
The takeaway: if you want to get people enrolled in your programs figure out where they experience your brand. There’s no internet available at 30,000 (well there was and there will likely be again soon, but not today that I’m aware of) and while there’s no cell signals this high either, there are tons of cell phones available and text messages can queue up. Every minute and/ or step you cut out of the process increases the number of people who make it through the funnel.
My second and third flights were both on United who used the same tactic but with a different message and technology. Lately United’s been pushing to get more customer feedback… given their financial state who knows how actionable that information is, but hey, I commend any company for being proactive about driving in customer feedback and rewarding people for it. So with this in mind it didn’t come as much of a surprise that their napkins promote an online survey. To take things even further, the in-flight magazine and even the tickets also promote the same survey. The survey’s been running for some time now so I was familiar with it already but for new fliers, the exposure is great – so great that I heard a few other passengers mention it. Now obviously this campaign is more delayed than the US Airways offering and down the road it would be great to see United encouraging instant feedback from people post flight so they can get a handle on issues in real time and of course from more people.
My 30-second idea: Get people to opt in for post flight text invites; those with smart phones get a little multi-choice web survey, those without get a question or two via text message. Nothing fancy, nothing long, just a basic “rate the flight” for text users and a couple of following “rate the timeliness, rate the service, rate the seats” type questions. Flow that back to both the marketing and operations groups in real-time tied with flight numbers and you can find trouble spots that day, not a month later.
The takeaway: Don’t miss an opportunity to get a message in front of people even if they can’t act immediately. It takes a lot of impressions to create recall so why not one more, and with a napkin you’re almost certain to hit the majority of your customer base with something most of them will see.
So I know I had posed a question initially and although I really just intended to blog about the experience, I should probably address it. What the napkin campaigns should really show is that if you have customers interacting offline, there are still online implications that go beyond sticking your url on a business card or 3-fold flier. I really like the US Airways campaign because it’s damn near immediate but in a store it could truly be immediate. And of course it’s practical to thousands of companies… grocery stores could drop the silly rewards cards form in favor of this sort of system (how many people really prefer to keep the card vs using their phone number anyways), a retail store could enroll you in web updates about a new technology product, warranty or online support system (FAQs), and a dry cleaner could shoot out a discount for subsequent visits tied into a reminder to pick up the dry cleaning (speaking of which….).
It’s unfortunate but we often have our web and brick & mortar channels so separated that it takes an act of god to transfer a customer from one to another when in reality the customer wants to use whichever channel is best for them. Airlines are not known for being nimble or quick so if they can figure out ways to link the two I’d make the assertion any business can. And when you think about it, getting people who are in your customer base back to your website can have two great ROI benefits – more engagement (leading to more sales opportunities) and reduced support/ incident load if there’s an immediate set of follow up information or survey system in place.