Magazine for the professional car and truck rental industry.
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had to make some website investments after the infl ux of traffi c crashed the site during its fi rst Groupon offer. "We got the site back up and with some additional space (bandwidth)," Piggott says. It's also important to think about how you can market the deal yourself, such as sending an email to customers or annouc- ing it on your social media accounts. While offering discounts directly through social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter can be diffi cult to manage — as reported by the operators in this article — you can at least use these platforms to market the deal. Though it may seem counterintuitive to market the deal to current customers, it might also be a chance for you to thank your social media followers. It's also important to track the analyt- ics the daily deal companies provide you. Hernandez, for example, says MPG unex- pectedly sold Groupon deals to customers from New York and San Francisco to all the way from Germany. While for Grand River, Piggott says the data "reconfi rmed" the demographic interested in car sharing. Remember too that you are in essence buying a targeted list of emails, and those that buy can now be added to your own database — they have after all shown an interest in your business. So do your duty to get their email and other relevant information. ARE THEY SATISFIED? "I wish we had done more of them soon- er," Stutz says, adding that companies re- ally have to remind themselves that daily deal sites are about advertising. "They get your name out there to all those people, and they're not charging you for it — un- less someone buys something." Grand River reports an extremely high retention rate of about 90%, accord- ing to Piggott. "Doing Groupon was the single-most successful marketing activity that we've done in 15 years," he says. "In terms of money spent and number of people recruited in a certain time, it was the most successful ever." Piggott says that Grand River has been operating on the assumption that the high retention rate is because daily deal cus- tomers were "on the fence" about joining DAILY DEAL WEBSITES AT A GLANCE Groupon.com — Started in 2008 and now provides deals in about 48 countries. Focuses on its customer service with the businesses it deals with and Groupon buyers. LivingSocial.com — Started in 2007 and reports 70 million members in a total of 19 coun- tries. Focuses on deal sharing, in which members can get the deal for free (paid for by LivingSocial) if they get three others to buy the deal. Yelp.com — Started in 2004 and reports 78 million monthly unique visitors. Focuses on reviews, in which Yelp users have written more than 30 million local reviews, according to Yelp. Other sites include: SharingSpree, Retail- MeNot, Dealster, Eversave and AmazonLocal, among many others. a car sharing organization. "We convert people," he says. Matarieh sees the deals as another avenue for brand awareness: "Whether we get a thousand sales or a hundred sales, it's all about the customer and how many people we've touched." AUTO RENTAL NEWS November/December 2012 19