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Best Practice: Ten tips for top-producing deal stores

We scoured SecondStreet Media's Promotions Lab for best-producing deal stores—and what they do right

Alisa Cromer
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Unlike a daily deal, a deal store combines multiple deals on a platform and allows them to be grouped around a holiday, event, or other category and promoted for a limited amount of time. So rather than (or in addition to) a daily deal, this allows media to run, say, a themed store of 12 deals for a week, several times a year.

Some media are making between $50,000 to $112,0000 per deal store, running multiple stores all year long. Here are some secrets to their winning formulas, taken from case studies of successful stores at SecondStreet Media's Promotions Lab:

1. Create a schedule of store deals that align with key holidays and 'local passions.'

Key holidays for top stores include Valentine’s Day, Father’s Day, Summer Fun, and, of course, the end-of-year holidays.

"Local passions" that have generated $50,000-plus from flash deal stores include those centered around golf, a university store selling student-oriented items, and year-end "Best Of" offers.

2. Limit the time. Deal stores typically run five days to two weeks. Restrictions on time are required to generate urgency from buyers. While some media have tried to keep deal stores stocked all year, short-running seasonal stores keep readers interested and sell more over time.

3. Promote the deals in traditional media and other sources. Promotions typically include email, such traditional advertising as full-page paper and radio ads, and social media. Email drives the most revenues, but merchants who see their deals featured in a newspaper or played on air consider that valuable as well, so don't stint on the promotions. Staffed booths are another successful strategy. An example that worked is a manned booth in a high traffic area of a university campus promoting a deals store aimed at student purchases. 

4. Include a variety of price points and deal categories. The most successful stores are often weighted towards restaurants, but all benefit from including a wide variety of options that range from $15 to $353. Other stores have been successful in the $5 to $15 range when the target audience—students for example—has less income.

5. Consider giving away promotional credits. The Fresno Bee pumped up its Summer Fun Deals store by emailing promotional credit in the form of a $5 “Mayday” credit towards any deal on May 1.

6. Deploy last-chance emails. An email promoting the last chance use the credit, or simply alerting consumers to the day before the store ends, has created significant last-minute lifts in deal store revenues.

7. Pre-sell best-selling deals into a 'Best Of' store at the end of the year. These "Best Of" stores are a great way to rerun the top deals of the year and reward the merchants. Create a criteria for sales and volume, such as $1,500 and/or 300 certificates sold, and make sure the merchants feel "selected." Pre-selling is a way to have the store created before December even hits. See two case studies here. 

8. Restricting number of merchants in the 'Best Of' Store. Since sales reps typically only close 20% of the "Best Of" deals they approach (some might have run another deal too recently, or are busy with the holiday rush), exclusivity can actually help make the numbers. One top-selling stores started with a limit of 12 stores (from top 60 leads) and increased to 24 the second year. But having a limit was a key to securing the deal repeats quickly.

9. Treat 'Best Of' merchants like the winners of any other 'Best Of' Contest.
That means giving them "Best Of" plaques and announcing the "Best deals of the year" as a recognition of the brand.

10. Assign sales reps with a specific list of prospects and a sales launch process. The top sellers we looked at vouched that giving reps a specific list of prospects to call and well-defined sales process was key to fast results. A sales rep with the right promotional materials and process can sell out 50% of the stores in a matter of hours.

Many thanks to SecondStreet's Promotions Lab for sharing these best practices from media partners with successful deal stores.

Alisa Cromer

The author, Alisa Cromer is publisher of a variety of online media, including LocalMediaInsider and  MediaExecsTech,  developed while on a fellowship with the Reynolds Journalism Institute and which has evolved into a leading marketing company for media technology start-ups. In 2017 she founded Worldstir.com, an online magazine,  to showcases perspectives from around the  world on new topic each month, translated from and to the top five languages in the world.

Best of, deal store, daily deal, second street