Blog

What Businesses Need To Know About Groupon and Groupon-Clones

Groupon, the nearly $15 billion behemoth of daily deal websites, is one of the hottest internet companies today. From their $6 billion Google acquisition offer to their purported IPO valuation of up to $25 billion, Groupon is making headlines everywhere. More recently, news about Groupon has been turning sour with articles from the New York Times, Reuters, and other numerous media outlets reporting horror stories of small business owners upset and traumatized with their Groupon experience.

How It Works

Groupon and the hundreds of Groupon-clones vying for you to strike a deal and sign up for their deep discount offering can be too much for any business owner to handle. Understanding how Groupon works and what to expect are the first steps in realizing whether Groupon is right for your business. Groupon and the likes provide a service where they offer potential customers a deep discount to a good or service. These discounts to the customer range from 50-90% off retail or face value. As a business, when you sign up for Groupon, they guarantee you increased customers. They do this in 2 ways, first the deal only goes “live” if a pre-determined minimum number of people purchase it and second, they send out your deal to their ever growing email list of subscribers which can be millions of new potential customers per city. Continue reading What Businesses Need To Know About Groupon and Groupon-Clones

How good is your general manager?

My team and I have a favorite Japanese Restaurant on Castro Street.  We love it so much that we go about 3 times a week for dinner.  Average order value is about $15 and we usually go with a group of 4 people, which means each month we bring in $720 worth of business.

It’s not the best Japanese food in the world, but it does have the best General Manager in the world – Robert.

Robert is awesome.  He welcomes us by name each time we enter the restaurant and provides us with Hot Sake on the house.

That’s the reason we keep coming back: recognition and free hot sake.

On average, we drink 2 bottles every visit.  I asked Robert how much it costs him to give us a free bottle of sake.  He chuckled a little and said, “To be honest, a bottle of hot sake only costs us a dollar.”

It’s not the dollar value that makes my friends and I feel special, it’s that Robert keeps providing us with bottles of hot sake without hesitation – because he appreciates our business.

At a cost of $24, he is able to consistently bring $720 worth of business each month.  If you could invest $24 to make $720 in a month, would you do it?

How good is your General Manager?

Continue reading How good is your general manager?

Innovative and Effective Uses of Social Media

What is Social Media

Social media is becoming all the rage with most businesses, especially restaurants and retail shops managing their own Facebook page and Twitter account. Five years ago, Facebook was barely mainstream, still catering primarily to the college market, and Twitter was hardly out of inception. Today, Facebook and Twitter decals adorn business’ websites and are prominently displayed on marketing collateral in hopes of having their customers connect with them through these social media channels.

Social media primarily refers to the use of web- and mobile-based technologies to share, connect, and interact with others. Through intricate and vast social networks, users are able to share and disseminate information extremely fast. The goals of successful social media campaigns are to connect with customers, reach new customers, and ultimately convert fans, followers, and loyal customers into actual sales. Some of the ways businesses are getting customers to engage with. Continue reading Innovative and Effective Uses of Social Media

RewardMe Loyalty Program Hits Vancouver!

It almost seems like it was just yesterday that RewardMe went mainstream in the San Francisco Bay area, and within a short few weeks RewardMe has gone international and has launched in Vancouver, Canada.

RewardMe in Vancouver has partnered up with restaurants and cafes such as Starbucks, Robson’s All India Restaurant, Da Jia Japanese Restaurant, Sushi Mart, Beefy Beef Noodles, Trees Organic Coffee and Vancouver Magazine’s Best Cheap Eats Zero One Sushi.

The reason why these establishments have decided to sign up and use RewardMe Loyalty Program is because it’s designed not to focus on the one time bargain hunter who will enjoy the deal and then never come back. It’s a program that focuses specifically on how to get repeat customer activity.

What’s also bad is once a daily deal is done, a restaurant is no longer advertised with the daily deal company. The company is off to focus on the next company that wants to do a daily deal. They don’t provide continuous advertising and marketing for a restaurant. They don’t try to build a long term relationship to help improve the sales and marketing for the restaurant. They don’t mention a restaurant to their growing customer base. If you want to be able to reach their new e-mail subscription list you need advertise with them again, and again give them at least 50% off. Continue reading RewardMe Loyalty Program Hits Vancouver!

Will the majority of your customers use your rewards technology?

With so many new technologies emerging, it’s tough to find the right one that suits your business.  As a restaurant or cafe, one of your primary objectives is to turn a new customer into a loyal customer.  Though great food and great service play a key role, a new generation of customers are asking for much more from a business: they want recognition, they want rewards, and they want special treatment.

To facilitate this relationship with a loyal customer, many businesses are turning to rewards programs.  You have four options to choose from for your rewards program:

  1. Punch card
  2. Magnetic rewards card
  3. Gaming apps such as Foursquare or SCVNGR
  4. Loyalty Management Apps such as RewardMe

Lets dissect each solution and how it applies to your mainstream customer – the majority of your clientele. Continue reading Will the majority of your customers use your rewards technology?

Top 3 Social Media Tools to Market Your Restaurant (Part 2/2)

Welcome back! In the first part of this series we looked at how Facebook was used to market a restaurant, int this article we’ll look at how Twitter and Mobile Marketing can be used to promote your restaurant to customers so that they always think about you.

Social Media Tool Number 2: Twitter

I’m going to say it again. It’s all about the two way interaction.
Twitter was designed so that people could interact with others but they had to do it under 140 characters. The first pitfall is that most restaurants don’t have a Twitter ID. Please go to Twitter and get one. By not having one, you’re missing out on some free promotions. I’ve been on Twitter where people asked around “Does anyone know if (name of a restaurant) has a Twitter handle?”

The second pitfall that many restaurants have is that they just send out a bunch of tweets of what’s happening in their restaurant, or what kind of deals they have, or “please retweet this message to get a discount. ” This doesn’t leave a lot of room for interaction. Customers want to feel valued, not ignored.

When you have a Twitter account, follow local people and start tweeting with them. Interact with them and respond to their comments. When someone tweets you back, start to have an online conversation with them. Retweet messages of others that may be relevant to your local community. Trust me, those that love you will tweet about you often. Check out @sweetmandarin to see how they’ve successfully interacted with customers. Continue reading Top 3 Social Media Tools to Market Your Restaurant (Part 2/2)

The Modern Barcode: Integrating The Physical And Online Worlds

QR codes, or “Quick Response” codes as the abbreviation stands for, are becoming more prevalent in American life every day. They can be found on store windows, on the side of buses, at cash registers, and even in bathrooms. What are these things, and where are they all coming from is the question that runs through many of our minds. For the vast majority of Americans, QR codes, pioneered by technology leaders such as Adobe, are still new. But quick education and mass adoption seem to be under way.

QR Code Origins

QR codes were originally developed in Japan in 1994 by a Toyota subsidiary primarily used for tracking parts of manufacturers. Ever since then, southeast Asian countries such as Japan and South Korea have been quick to adopt QR codes into everyday life. These special barcodes scan very fast and have the ability to display text, compose an email, link to a URL, or take a specific action if scanned within a particular application. The majority of mobile phones in Japan and South Korea have built-in QR code readers which almost instantaneously decipher and generate the link or action designed to take place. Continue reading The Modern Barcode: Integrating The Physical And Online Worlds