If you can get the right offer in front of the right prospect at the right time–when they’ve expressed an interest–you’re delivering real value to that prospect and they are much more likely to become a customer. So when I saw an announcement last month that two companies had partnered to create Daily Deals promotions that were based on realtime Twitter conversations, I was intrigued. Imagine if I post a tweet saying “I’m looking for a restaurant,” and I immediately receive an offer for a 50% coupon at a local Italian place? Now that’s realtime marketing.
Both of the companies involved in this deal are very interesting. Needium is a social media monitoring company that identifies “needs” or customer expressions of interest and converts those into leads for its clients. Their role is to monitor Twitter for expressed needs, and then suggest relevant deals to that Twitter user.
The offers themselves are generated by OneBigPlanet, a deals aggregation platform or “intelligent offer network,” as they put it in their marketing. CEO Eric Aubertin is very bullish on the future of realtime deal offers. Daily Deals are a highly localized business. With at least 40% of tweets being sent via mobile devices, advertisers are confronted with a “short attention span and must deliver instant gratification” to be successful.
So how does OneBigPlanet deliver the right offer to the right consumer at the right time? The company, which started out creating loyalty programs before moving into local deals, coupons and now the mobile space, has developed a database of deals and offers from across a network of national and local platforms. It aggregates offers from companies like Groupon, Living Social and CityDeals, standardizes and indexes them, adding tags and keywords, so it can select and deliver the best offer for a given context. Deals can be selected based on their source, geo-data, categories, keywords and other criteria.
Current clients include both b2b and b2c brands who are using OneBigPlanet to white-label deals offers — delivered via email, web, mobile or print — to customers or employees. For example, HR services provider Insperity works with its clients to include customized deal offers in emails that educate employees about their workplace benefits. Women’s media giant Meredith used the service to create shoponbuy.com, and Nascar uses it to send out a branded daily deal email to fans.
Using the OneBigPlanet services and API, brands can add Daily Deals offers to their messaging in any number of ways:
- branded daily deals emails, which can also include coupons or online deals
- creating and managing a white label daily deals site
- integrated into your mobile application
- included in printed newsletters or publications
According to a Yahoo!/Ipsos study, 61% of daily deals emails are opened, and 45% of are being shared. So while there is growing skepticism about the viability of daily deals for the companies offering them, adding such offers to your own content may help build readership, increase open rates and increase loyalty. And if you can deliver a deal for your product or service to a customer who’s looking for it right then and there — all the better.
Let us know what you think – do you have any experience using or offering Daily Deals? Does a service like this make you think about building third-party deals or other offers into your marketing content?
