Valpak goes mobile: Ten Top Strategies
Not your grandfather's coupons
In the past year, Valpak.com, owned by Cox Enterprises in Atlanta, has entered the mobile coupon market in force. A pop-up window collects SMS opt-ins from every digital visitor. Here's an outline of Valpak's strategy today.
Challenge: Of the 26,000 advertisers running in any given month across all of Valpak's franchisees, only about 18,000 of customers have been sold online coupons. The new challenge is to sell mobile products and services, while still facing resistance from some custoemrs to running online coupons. The biggest objections in the market come from confusion about online tracking and concerns about fraud. Some of the top sales staff also have resisted, pointing out w that their cients did not want online coupons.
Stategy: Positionning Valpak to compete with a proliforation of online coupon companies meant developing initiatives that build on strengths but quickly incorporate new technologies.
1.Build on its customer base. Among the various players in the coupon space, Valpak has significant strengths, including a vast customer base of loyal, coupon-dependent companies. “Regarding the competition. ..the difference is that we have a relationship that was based on print, in a lot of cases - actually 10,0000 or so cases - they like doing business with Valpak because they were successful in the print space. They don’t know that we’ve struggled with this for ten years," says Jim Buckley, Director of Digital Sales Development at Valpak. So while a new market for companies newly interested in coupons has developed, Valpak's main challenge has been convert its core clients to more sophisticated digital packages.
2. Train advertisers to use digital redemptions. Buckley understands that the key to converting to digital and mobile couponing is to train literally thousands of traditional businesses to use digital redemptions. "Once that has been accomplished, adding products is much easier," says Buckley. "Once we close the redemptive loop, someone comes in and shows their phone" a critical transitional step has been made.
3. Product development heavey on mobile. Valpak's site breaks down into zip codes, and then categories of coupon channels: Auto, Beauty, Restaurants, Entertainment, Groceries, General, Health and Shops. The coupons are more for "every day shopping" than group or last chance deals. Valpak today uses "coopetition" to fill in the sites, "we have a feed relationship with 150 other coupon sites."
To capture SMS opt'ins for mobile coupons, a pop-up window (see image on the right) asks every visitor who searches their own zip code to check which categories they are most interested in, the name of any specific local business they may are interested in seeing coupons from, and for an SMS opt'in.
The pop-up requests a mobile phone number, and language to confirm that this information counts as an sms opt-in (see the image to the right). A second check box confirms, "Please send occasional messages on my mobile phone that contain new offers, savings or promotions from Valpak, Valpak.com, or any of their advertisers"
4. A single dashboard where customers can track all products. Valpak has invested in a single dashboard where customers can see the results from different offers and distribution channels for their, as they are added. The single dashboard also means that new products, such as mobile coupons, are "not perceived as 'new' in the same way. The single dashboard also "keeps it simple to manage and report."
5.Packaging everything. We've noted elsewhere that packaging helps small businesses to be able to make a single simple decision, Buckley says this is also true at Valpak: “Combining the package helps them along the path," says Buckley. "What advertisers want is one stop shopping. They want it to be relatively simple, make one call, work with someone they trust. They want to know that it s going to work and they will get a variety of services."
6. Developing an extensive mobile network. Inspite of the de-Geeking of the packages and single user-dashboard, Valpak's expansion into the mobile space is quite complex. "We are on iPhone Android palm and blackberry, have apps for all of them. Integrating the packages just keeps things simple for clients and reps."
7. Selling the benefits of online and mobile. "We’ve always had an approach of tracking redemption," Buckley says. But now the sales representatives are training customers on the higher redemption rates and superior audience for online and mobile coupons. "Now advertisers are say I’m seeing a younger audience that I didn’t think Valpak would produce," Buckley says, so selling mobile really relies on training on the higher conversion rates. While local print coupon redemption rates are 1%, online coupons have been running 10 to 13%, and mobile is getting "something north of 20%." The iPad is even higher, he says, becuase of the physical representation of the coupon.
8. Development of a separate digital group. "A current initiative at ValPak is developing a separate digital group that will give us the abilty to inetrate in an agressive fashion with support from the top, and with using the traditional salespeople," Buckley says. This team will include regional digital business constulants who will help train existing reps.
9. Internal evangelists. "We had major resistance early on. People didn’t understand" what we were doing, Buckly says. Part of the process was building from a few internal evangelists to gain a kind of internal crtical mass of evangelism. "There is a huge evangelism that goes with this. You have to have a group of people who are deeply passionate about digital and mobile. Its very much a case of the tipping point you get to the point in your organization that that 20 to 25 people who are excited about the future of the company. That ‘s about where ValPak is."
It should go without saying but this kind of total company conversion into the digital space requires the C-suite to lead and back-up the charge. "It took us a while to convince our internal folks then it took a year to get critical mass related to our franchisees," Buckley says. "C-level commitment is critical."
10. Expanding into new products. Valpak is also developing their own daily deal. "We took a long hard look at daily deal, we are going to do our own version of it as an integrated package of advertising." They have also started doing seminars with advertisers who are confused by market choices. "You do not have to be at a start up to do excitng and innovative work."
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.
Keywords
valpak, coupons,
